MATAGALPA, Nicaragua -- For a second straight year, Central American coffee workers and their families are starving as plummeting world prices for the crop shut down farms and force unemployed pickers to beg for food and aid.

Across the region and in southern Mexico, half a million coffee workers are estimated to have lost their jobs, while growers have been unable to get public or private financing to save their farms, Reuters reported.

Nowhere is the crisis more evident than in Nicaragua, Latin America's poorest country after Haiti, where authorities said last week at least 14 people have died -- 11 of them children -- from hunger and malnutrition in the past few months.

"We have made an urgent call to the government that without immediate action to bring food and medicine more people will die," said National Child Welfare Director Emilio Lopez.

Oversupply in world coffee markets has driven prices so low that many plantation owners in the region cannot afford to pick their crops or are being driven out of business by high debts.

World coffee prices are hovering around 50 cents a pound, just up from historic lows near 45 cents a pound set last October, but still far below the 70 to 80 cents a pound it costs on average to produce a pound of coffee.

Meanwhile, industry analysts estimate there is an oversupply of about 15 percent in the global coffee market and world production continues to grow faster than rising coffee consumption.

Farmers in Guatemala also are struggling, with the United Nations' World Food Program launching in August a "food-for-work" program in a bid to help some 12,000 families in rural areas facing food shortages from an ongoing drought.

WFP estimates that nearly 1.4 million people in Central America are suffering the effects of the drought with agricultural production dramatically lower. The worst hit countries are Honduras, Nicaragua and El Salvador, in addition to Guatemala.

**** Walking for Days***** The program launch coincided with an international call to donor countries by the WFP to boost food aid to the drought-hit region where around 775,000 people face critical food shortages.

In Nicaragua, the crisis has left 30,000 full-time coffee workers without jobs. Since June, workers and their families have streamed from isolated rural communities into cities, often walking for days to seek help.

In the mountainous northern Province of Matagalpa, a leading coffee-growing region, parents bring their children to a run-down clinic in hopes of getting medicine and food.

Dozens of children waited outside the clinic, their tattered clothes revealing bellies swollen from parasites. One child, Elder Davila, nearly 5 years old, was weighed at the clinic at 8.5 pounds (4kg) --close to what a newborn might weigh.

Erica Jimenez, a 20-year-old coffee worker, said she buried her 2-year-old daughter two months ago after the child went two weeks without eating.

"I'm afraid my other children will die, because they have no work or food," she said.

Some 6,100 coffee workers, including 4,000 children, live in makeshift shantytowns in Matagalpa, the region's capital, the Nicaraguan Human Rights Ombudsmen's Office said.

They camp along roadsides and in local parks, taking turns asking passersby for handouts.

Grower Martin Hernandez abandoned his coffee crop at his farm, El Paraiso (Paradise), about 110 miles (180km) from Managua. He expects to lose farm to the bank due to unpaid debt.

Low prices drove production costs up, forcing him to lay off 100 workers.

"It hurts to see these poor people in the street dying of hunger, and you can't help because you don't have money to pay them wages," Hernandez said.