FAUCHE, Haiti (AP) - Looking over his field of toppled banana trees, Jean Tilhomme Fontius said he had no choice but to raise prices on a staple fruit in this food-starved country after Hurricane Gustav battered his crop.

"I don’t know how much we’re going to sell them for now, but the price is going to have to go up," said the 51-year-old farmer, offering an apologetic shrug.

Hurricane Gustav and Tropical Storm Fay both slammed Haiti in the past two weeks, killing at least 85 people and dealing a serious setback to efforts to boost agricultural production and break the impoverished country’s dependence on imported food.

Relief workers are scrambling to respond to a crisis within a crisis as storm damage combined with persistent food shortages threatened to destabilize an already fragile political situation. Even as Gustav assaulted the southern city of Jacmel on Tuesday, protests over food prices were starting anew.

By week’s end, 8,000 people were still in shelters, some running out of food, while a preliminary U.N. report said Gustav’s destruction to Haitian cropland was "very significant."

World Vision International planned to distribute food for 400 people on Friday, only to see 1,000 show up. Almost 90 refugees in the town of Petit Goave still waited for food in a school shelter three days after the storm.

A single pot of unseasoned beans simmered unwanted on a charcoal stove. The refugees refused to eat them without rice.

"We’ve been out of food since yesterday. The people outside are screaming," said Fritzgerald Douge, the municipal official in charge of the shelter, who had ducked into the principal’s office to avoid an angry crowd of mothers.

The Western Hemisphere’s poorest nation was already reeling from skyrocketing world food prices and rampant child malnutrition. Food riots in April left at least six Haitians and a U.N. peacekeeper dead and toppled the prime minister.

Only a fraction of tens of thousands of tons in food aid promised to quell the riots had been delivered by July.

The storms struck just as Haiti was making progress. World Vision International reached its goal of handing out more than 550 tons (500 metric tons) of food in August - including some that had piled up in warehouses in July.

New Prime Minister Michele Pierre-Louis, who was approved by parliament in late July, was working to build a new government.