Mexican authorities seized a ton of opium seeds they found
aboard a ship in the Gulf coast port of Veracruz, the government
said Wednesday.  The contraband was discovered on Monday, when
navy personnel and customs agents carried out a "physical
inspection of the container that had been unloaded from a boat
coming from Turkey," the navy said in a statement.  The search
turned up 40 sacks containing 988.9 kilos (2,178 pounds) of
opium seeds, the statement said.  The navy offered no
information on the sender of the consignment or the intended
recipient in Mexico.  Opium poppies - the raw material of heroin
- are cultivated in at least five of Mexico's 31 states:
Guerrero, Michoacan, Durango, Chihuahua and Sinaloa.  A 2007
report by Mexico's Superior Agrarian Tribunal found that 30
percent of the country's arable land was in the hands of drug
traffickers or their operatives.  The tribunal's presiding
judge, Ricardo Garcia Villalobos, who said the 8 million
hectares (nearly 20 million acres) then planted with mari