PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AP) – The 5-year-old teetered on broomstick legs – he weighed less than 20 pounds, even after days of drinking enriched milk. Nearby, a 4-year-old girl hung from a strap attached to a scale, her wide eyes lifeless, her emaciated arms dangling weakly.

In pockets of Haiti accessible only by donkey or foot, children are dying of malnutrition – their already meager food supply cut by a series of devastating storms that destroyed crops, wiped out livestock and sent food prices spiraling.

At least 26 severely malnourished children have died in the past four weeks in the remote region of Baie d’Orange in Haiti’s southeast, aid workers said Thursday, and there are fears the toll will rise much higher if help does not come quickly to the impoverished Caribbean nation.

Another 65 severely malnourished children are being treated in makeshift tent clinics in the mountainous area, or at hospitals where they were evacuated in Port-au-Prince and elsewhere, said Max Cosci, who heads the Belgian contingent of Doctors Without Borders in Haiti.

One evacuee, a 7-year-old girl, died while being treated, Cosci said, adding: “The situation is extremely, extremely fragile and dangerous.”

Rural families already struggling with soaring food prices in Haiti, the Western Hemisphere’s poorest country, lost their safety nets when fields were destroyed and livestock wiped out by the storms, which killed nearly 800 people and caused $1 billion worth of damage in August and September.

U.N. World Food Program country director Myrta Kaulard said she fears more deaths from malnutrition in other isolated parts of Haiti, and search and medical teams were fanning out in the northwest and along the southwestern peninsula to check.

The World Food Program has sent more than 30 tons of food aid – enough to feed 5,800 people for two weeks – into the remote southeastern region since September, and other groups funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development have sent food as well, she said.

But the steep, narrow paths and poor visibility make it difficult to deliver the food to the mountain communities where hunger is worsening. In one case, a WFP truck flipped over while struggling up a hill and slid into a ravine, killing an aid worker.

Haiti in general and the mountain villages in particular have long suffered from chronic hunger. Child malnutrition rates have been high for years – the WFP reported in 2007 that nearly a quarter of children were chronically malnourished.

But throughout the year, aid workers and officials have been seeing hunger get more severe, and now people who live in the mountains and aid groups who are working there say the situation is worse than it has been in the past.

This year, for instance, Haiti’s agriculture ministry estimates 60 percent of the harvest was lost in the storms nationwide. Land quality is already poor and farmers lost seeds for next year when the storms hit, Kaulard said.

Effects of the storms vary widely from village to village and even family to family. In some places, food supplies seem intact. In others, Doctors Without Borders has found rates of severe malnutrition as high as 5 percent.

Aid shortages may soon compound the problem. Donor countries have funded only a third of the U.N.’s $105 million aid appeal for Haiti following the storms, and resources could run out in January, Kaulard said.