By JAN McGIRK
More than 1.5 million Central Americans are unable to feed themselves after three months of drought in the worst crisis to hit Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua and Honduras since Hurricane Mitch in 1998.
An emergency relief effort by the United Nations World Food Programme is reaching only about one-third of the hungry with parts of eastern Guatemala experiencing famine conditions.
In El Trifinio, the barren region that borders Honduras and El Salvador, 41 people have starved to death this summer.
Guatemala's President, Alfonso Portillo, said the deaths, mostly of elderly or very young victims, "come as no surprise" and local health officials warned that another 31 village infants are being treated for severe malnutrition.
President Portillo has appealed to international agencies to increase their donations of food, and promised to raise taxes enough to assemble an emergency task force that will feed his country's hungriest citizens.
Neighbouring Honduras has declared a national emergency and hundreds of hungry peasants marched on the Nicaraguan capital Managua last week in an attempt to spur government action.
Across the region, 80 per cent of the corn crop has already failed and many families are left scrounging for anything to fill their bellies.
Watery soups made from shrimp heads or bits of mango or banana washed down with milk once a day cannot provide adequate nutrition.
At the best of times, rural families must eke out a living on a wage of $NZ5 a day, and many farmers' families are now reduced to eating the seed corn set aside for planting a second crop that is normally harvested in November.
A UN spokesman said the famine was the worst crisis to hit the area since Hurricane Mitch killed 26,000 people three years ago.
Francisco Roque Castro, regional director of the UN World Food Programme, said: "There is chronic hunger."
Malnourished children lack the strength to fight off dysentery, cholera, dengue fever or respiratory infections, and are desperate for medical attention.
All emergency provisions on hand have been quickly devoured, and delays in the arrival of new food and seed donations are causing concern.
In many places, clean drinking water is in short supply after the poor rainfall.
Misery is intensifying across Central America's dusty rural heartland.
Even before the summer rains failed, 6,000 children were dying from hunger every year in earthquake-rocked El Salvador, according to a UN report.
Coming on the heels of a two-year world coffee glut that has devastated landless day labourers who were fed and housed on plantations, the withered food crops of beans and corn now compound the suffering.
Stunted children with the distended bellies and lightened hair that denotes protein deficiency are omnipresent on roadsides, whimpering for handouts.
Debt-strapped farmers are unable to stump up cash or secure credit to buy the pesticides and fertilisers needed to replant their depleted plots, so hunger continues.
Lenders threaten to repossess smallholdings, so the desperate campesinos must sell off the family chickens or dairy cows that might have enriched their diets with eggs or milk.
Migrants trying to make their way north through Mexico to find work in the United States are being thwarted by an aggressive new deportation policy at Mexico's southern border.
The numbers have dropped by about 40 per cent in recent weeks, despite the famine.
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Millions face famine as drought hits Central America
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