More than one million people in southern Madagascar are facing acute food insecurity as the region grapples with its worst drought in four decades, the United Nations said Tuesday.

Five straight years of low rainfall have wiped out harvests and hampered access to food, compounding the effects of erosion caused by deforestation and devastating sandstorms.

"Around 1.14 million people in the south of Madagascar are facing high levels of acute food insecurity," the World Food Programme (WFP) and Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said in a joint statement.

Almost 14,000 of these people have been classed in category five, the highest level of the UN's food scarcity ranks -- a first for Madagascar since the scale was introduced in 2016.

"With each day that passes, more lives are at stake as hunger tightens its grip," the statement said.

UN agencies are seeking to draw attention to a humanitarian crisis it says "risks being invisible".

The Indian Ocean island nation's borders have been shut since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, making it difficult for aid agencies to provide relief.

Acute malnutrition rates are rising in the worst-affected Amboasary Atsimo district, where up to three quarters of the population have been affected by a disastrous cocktail of drought, sandstorms, pests and the impact of Covid-19.

"It is extremely bad. Children are starving, children are dying," said WFP operations director Amer Daoudi, adding that he met a mother carrying an eight-month-old child who appeared just two months old.

The famine has triggered an exodus with entire villages "shutting down", Daoudi said.

Most of southern Madagascar's population relies on agriculture, livestock and fishing.

Food production has been dramatically low since 2019.

"Years of poor harvests driven by drought upon drought... have pushed people to the brink," warned FAO emergencies and resilience director Dominique Burgeon.

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