Fourteen people have starved in the mountains of Paradise already this year.

So say the people here, desperate for food and medical treatment. Children hold rags to their red and swollen eyes. They stand along the highway with parents who try to flag down the occasional passing car to beg for help.

Maria Sanchez, 35, and her six children live in a small home in la Hacienda San Luis in the department of Matagalpa, located 135 kilometers north of Managua. Sanchez is one of the lucky women in the area; she has been able to find steady employment.

Like many coffee-growing regions, residents of this community whose name means Paradise in English once could provide for their families.

But coffee prices have plummeted, despite the growing popularity of mochas and lattes among the well-to-do in the world’s prosperous cities, and coffee farmers are increasingly going hungry. Their plants die on steep mountainsides.

A report released Wednesday by the international relief agency Oxfam said coffee prices were at their lowest level in real terms in 100 years. A glut of low-quality beans has left 25 million coffee farmers in crisis. Families are going hungry. Banks in coffee regions have collapsed.

In Vietnam, one of the world’s most economical producers, farmers are covering only 60 percent of their costs, while Ethiopia’s export revenue from coffee fell 42 percent in one year, Oxfam said.

The agency blames the five biggest roasters Nestle S.A., Kraft Foods Inc., Sara Lee Corp. Procter & Gamble Co. and Tchibo Holding AG and accuses them of profiting off the poor.

The crisis is especially acute in Nicaragua. The price plunge hit as the industry was still trying to recover from both Hurricane Mitch and the civil war that ended in 1990.

Desperate for help, farmers last week took five government officials hostage for a day, then released them after federal negotiators intervened. For more than a year, farmers have been leaving their mountainside shacks in search of food, sometimes blocking highways or setting up camps in parks.

The federal government agreed Saturday to provide limited financing and food to farmers, and some workers have been given temporary jobs clearing brush along mountain highways.

But that aid has not reached the 100 people from El Paraiso who spent this week gathered on the narrow shoulder of highway overlooking lush mountain valleys.

The government says 6,000 people are malnourished nationally and recorded 14 related deaths last month.

The farmers have little knowledge of why the world market has robbed them of their salaries of $1.40 a day.

“They don’t explain to us what is the problem,” said the group’s leader, Santo Santeno. “This keeps happening year after year, and we still don’t understand why.”

He blames the five main roasters which, according to Oxfam, buy half the world’s coffee.

“They buy it cheap and sell it at high prices,” he said. “How can countries like Nicaragua compete?”

Nestle, Sara Lee and Kraft blame an oversupply of 40 million bags, and they say they can do more for farmers by encouraging people to drink more coffee.

“At Kraft, we believe the most important contribution we can make to the long-term health of the coffee industry, including the sustained well being of farmers, is to continue to promote consumer demand,” the company said in a statement responding to the Oxfam report.