Hampered by equipment shortages, severed phone lines and the destruction of countless roads and bridges, rescue workers across Central America are struggling to reach legions of isolated and desperate survivors of tropical storm Mitch.

Government officials and aid groups warned that it could take years before the impoverished region recovers from the storm, which ruined much of its crops and wrecked tens of thousands of homes and businesses.

In Honduras, which bore the brunt of Mitch's fury during its drenching five-day march across Central America, reports of hunger and disease were emerging from vast areas that have been cut off from the rest of the country by heavy flooding and mudslides. Authorities warned that the situation would swiftly deteriorate unless they receive more international food and medicine and are able to rebuild quickly washed-out bridges and roads.

"Right now, it is a race against time. There are still isolated areas that we have not been able to reach. It is impossible to get to these people," President Carlos Flores Facusse said in an interview on Wednesday. "What we have is general devastation of everything from infrastructure to our agricultural economy to human lives. Our crisis is nationwide. We really do not have any zones left intact."

Besides such immediate needs, the longer-term task of rebuilding Honduras and neighbouring Nicaragua - the two poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere after Haiti - could take several years and will probably cost billions of dollars, international observers and government officials said.

Nearly 70 per cent of Honduras's key crops - including bananas, rice, beans and corn - are estimated to have been destroyed in the storm, and Honduran officials are at a loss to say how the country will feed itself without extensive foreign aid. Both countries, moreover, will have to rebuild major portions of their transportation network, as well as water, telephone and electricity systems. For the most part, authorities have not even begun to reckon with the staggering losses of homes and businesses.

Formerly a hurricane in the Caribbean basin, Mitch lost strength last week and moved inland, where it dumped up to 50 inches of rain in some places before it began to dissipate on Sunday. But Mitch subsequently recovered some of its strength and arrived in South Florida on Thursday as a fast-moving tropical storm, bringing 4 to 8 inches of rain before heading towards the Bahamas.

Central America has had its share of natural catastrophes in recent decades, such as the massive 1976 earthquake that killed 23,000 people in Guatemala and the 1972 earthquake in the Nicaraguan capital of Managua that killed more than 10,000. But perhaps none has cut so wide a destructive swath. Mitch has killed an estimated 9,000 people across Central America, most of them in Honduras and perhaps 2,000 in Nicaragua, with smaller numbers of dead in El Salvador and Guatemala. Thousands more are still missing.

"This was the most destructive natural disaster to hit the region in more than 50 years," said Mr Mark L. Schneider, assistant administrator for the US Agency for International Development, which is co-ordinating the US relief effort. "In Honduras, it is the entire country that was devastated, and in Nicaragua, it was the entire north-west of the country . . . The capacity to move anything over land is completely destroyed."

Nicaraguan officials said an estimated 1,500 people were killed when a crater lake in the Casitas volcano near the country's border with Honduras overflowed and sent heaps of mud and rocks crashing down on communities below. Overall, authorities estimated that about a third of the country was without water or electricity, and that perhaps a quarter of its transportation infrastructure was seriously damaged.

"To reconstruct the highways alone will cost hundreds of millions of dollars," said Mr Alfonso Ortega Urbina, Nicaragua's ambassador to the United Nations, adding that huge amounts of crops were destroyed by strong winds, flooding and mudslides. "In the next six months, we're going to have problems feeding our population."

Countries around the world continued to offer assistance. The EU Commission said it approved $8 million in humanitarian aid for Central America, and Germany promised $2.2 million. The Pentagon has sent 500 troops, 20 aircraft, four helicopters and 10 inflatable boats for the relief operation.

While President Flores said he was gratified by the response from countries such as Mexico, Spain and Taiwan, he suggested that the United States could have moved more quickly. "I would say we have received moderate assistance from the United States," Mr Flores said. "Now we are receiving a little more, but I do not know how punctual it will be."

"Overall, it seems the scale of the tragedy . . . is not being matched right now by the level of the relief effort," said Mr Hugh Byrne, a senior associate at the Washington Office on Latin America, a private thinktank.

Mr Flores said at least 6,420 people have been confirmed dead in Honduras and more than 11,000 others have been injured. Nearly 12,000 could be missing, and about 1.4 million people either have been evacuated to shelters or have lost their homes, he said.

In Honduras, where 93 bridges were severed by raging floods, effectively turning this country into a nation of islands, the Honduran military continued round-the-clock relief and rescue missions using the 14 helicopters and six aircraft that make up its aviation fleet. The missions have been made more difficult by fuel shortages throughout the country.

"In many ways this is worse than a war because fighting Mother Nature is much more difficult," said Col Francisco Davila, director of operations and drills for the Honduran armed forces. "Right now, it is very difficult, time-consuming and uses a lot of fuel to conduct rescues because you have to do people one by one from such places as rooftops and trees."

To pay for the relief efforts, the Honduran government already has been forced to cut spending from its budget by, for instance, suspending raises that had been promised to teachers and slashing non-essential programmes. Overall, Mr Flores said, "We will have to start from below-zero. It is a supreme effort we have to make. But we will rebuild because we only have one country."