Malaysia: Malaysia's Foreign Minister will meet his Bangladeshi counterpart to discuss the crisis involving a surge in stricken boatpeople from Bangladesh and Myanmar flooding to Southeast Asia.

‘It is one of the topics and a very important issue on the agenda,’ Foreign Minister Anifah Aman was quoted saying in a brief dispatch by Malaysia's official news agency Bernama.

The meeting on Sunday with Bangladesh's AH Mahmood Ali will take place at Kota Kinabalu, in Sabah on Malaysia's Borneo island.

Reports in Bangladeshi media suggest the country's top diplomat was in Malaysia for a pre-planned trip rather than in response to the growing international uproar over the migrant influx.

Malaysian foreign ministry officials could not be immediately reached to comment on this.

More than 1,000 migrants have washed ashore in Malaysia over the past week, with hundreds of others reaching Indonesia.

Activists say thousands more are feared to be drifting at sea in rickety boats after a Thai crackdown on human-trafficking disrupted busy smuggling routes to Southeast Asia.

International pressure on the region to take in the starving migrants arriving in rickety vessels has mounted after Malaysia and Indonesia turned away boats.

The arrivals from Muslim Bangladesh are believed to be mainly economic migrants seeking to escape their country's grinding poverty, while those from Myanmar are predominantly members of that country's repressed Muslim ethnic Rohingya minority.

Thousands of such migrants make it to Malaysia every year, which is sought after because of its relatively prosperous economy and because it is predominantly Muslim.