Sudan is on the verge of a famine in parts of the capital city Khartoum and the central Darfur region due to the conflict between two rival military factions, the World Food Programme said.

Millions of people are at risk of starvation amid the worst conditions since at least 2003. A nine-month war between Sudan’s army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces has cut off huge swaths of the North African nation to aid groups and displaced hundreds of thousands of farmers, the group said, devastating this year’s harvest.

"In locations such as central Darfur and certain parts of Khartoum, we have received reports of people dying either of malnutrition or starvation,” Eddie Rowe, WFP country director for Sudan, said in an interview from Port Sudan.

About 5 million people are at imminent risk of famine, meaning they can already no longer afford one meal per day, according to Rowe. "Certain parts of Khartoum are inaccessible and people are literally trapped and cannot move out,” he said.

The RSF, which has its origins in the Janjaweed militia group from Sudan’s western Darfur region, had recently been in the ascendancy in Khartoum, but the army has retaliated with air strikes reported in the vicinity of Omdurman, Khartoum’s sister city, Rowe said.

Attempts by regional leaders and the international community to bring together Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, the head of the army, and Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, the RSF leader, for peace talks have proved futile. Burhan declined an invitation to attend a Thursday summit of regional leaders in Uganda.

The WFP has made contingency plans to leave Sudan should the RSF attack army positions in Port Sudan, the eastern city on the Red Sea that’s one of its last remaining havens.

"The prospect of this conflict spreading keeps us awake at night — here in Port Sudan we are on a knife edge,” Rowe said. "If we do not have some form of intervention by the international community or regional players we will send this country into abject collapse.”

Rowe said wheat production along the River Nile in Al-Jazirah state, Sudan’s so-called breadbasket, usually amounts to roughly 350,000 tons annually. Yet that could fall to almost nothing come harvest-time in March, with many farmers having fled further east.

"We might not have any meaningful harvest,” Rowe said.

A survey by the U.S.-based International Food Policy Research Institute published last month showed 73% of agrifood processing and manufacturing enterprises had permanently or temporarily closed due to the conflict.