Puerto Rico already imports about 85 percent of its food, and now its food imports are certain to rise drastically as local products like coffee and plantains are added to the list of Maria’s staggering losses. Local staples that stocked supermarkets, school lunchrooms and even Walmart are gone.

“Sometimes when there are shortages, the price of plantain goes up from $1 to $1.25. This time, there won’t be any price increase; there won’t be any product,” Mr. Rivera said. “When I heard the meteorologist say that the two had turned into a three and then a four, I thought, ‘Agriculture in Puerto Rico is over.’ This really is a catastrophe.”

He noted that other islands that export food to Puerto Rico, such as the Dominican Republic, Dominica and St. Martin, were also hit, and that the food supply could be even more precarious if the island’s other suppliers were also affected.

“There won’t be any gandules at Christmas this year,” Mr. Ortiz said, referring to a local favorite usually served as a combination of rice, pigeon peas and pork called arroz con gandules. “Even if we planted now, they won’t be ready.”

Mr. Ortiz, 80, said he had been working these fields for seven decades. He has lived through his share of hurricanes, including Georges, which wiped out the local sugar refinery in 1998.

“I have never seen losses like these in any of my 80 years,” he said as he stood on a riverbank, counting the number of coconut trees that fell. He could earn $100 a month from each one of them. A dozen cracked in half, beside a nursery where the winds swept away all the seedlings and left behind broken glass and ruin.

“Those palms take about 10 years to grow,” he said. “I will be dead by then.”

He is not the owner, but he said it hurt all the same. “You know what it’s like to see the place where you earn your daily bread destroyed?”