Food crisis feared in Guatemala

QUETZALTENANGO, Guatemala - Army helicopters and aid trucks ferried food and water today to Guatemalan highland villages where thousands are packed into shelters, their homes swallowed by mudslides last week.

Service stations in the country's mountainous west were out of petrol and fresh food supplies ran short, with swathes of farmland in the south still under water and roads cut off by banks of mud or wrecked bridges.

"Guatemala is in crisis. Even here we have no fresh meat, no potatoes, no vegetables," said a waiter in a popular backpackers' eatery in Guatemala's second city Quetzaltenango.

Vegetable plantations and chicken farms were destroyed by floods and the land looks from the air like a patchwork quilt of cocoa-colored lakes. Farmers were hampered by a lack of heavy machinery to help them clear roads.

The official toll from flooding and mudslides after Hurricane Stan last week is over 650 dead and some 400 missing but emergency workers put the real number at around 2000.

While aid agencies worked with the army and government to stem the crisis, many fear the worst is still to come for tens of thousands of surviving Maya Indian peasants in the fir-covered mountains, now streaked with dozens of mudslides.

"At the moment we are just dealing with the emergency but the worst will come afterward: epidemics, destroyed harvests, peasants who can't return to their land. And we can't do anything about that," said air force pilot Hans Yaeggy at a military base in Quetzaltenango, where he was flying food and bottled water out to victims.

- REUTERS