By Steve Stewart

One and a half million Central Americans are on the verge of starvation, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) warned September 2. The FAO believes 700,000 will not survive unless they receive immediate food assistance.

While much of Central America has been mired in chronic poverty since the European invasion 500 years ago, widespread famine in the region is something unknown for decades. .

Two factors have brought Central America to the brink of starvation - plummeting world coffee prices that have reached historic lows and an on-going environmental catastrophe that has as its most recent manifestation a region-wide drought.

In less than two years the world market price for coffee has dropped more than 50% - from $1.02 /lb for Arabica at the beginning of 2000 to $.46/lb by October of this year. And that is the price on the world market. Intermediaries pay small growers as little as 20 cents a pound.

As a result, more than 4,000 coffee plantations and cooperatives went bankrupt this year in the Nicaraguan coffee growing regions.Tens of thousands of homeless, jobless and hungry coffee workers roam the countryside or cluster in plastic and cardboard shanty-towns in city parks.