The Parliamentary Committee on Agriculture has maintained its stand that the Malawi Vulnerability Assessment Committee (MVAC) should be disbanded.

The committee’s Chairperson, Dr. Joseph Chidanti Malunga, said MVAC is a parallel institution whose activities can also be done by the ministry of Agriculture.

“They told us that they use the same staff that the ministry uses so if that is the case then, it’s better to fuse it with the ministry of Agriculture,” Dr. Malunga said.

He said this when MVAC officials appeared before the committee in Lilongwe where among others, they briefed members on the new data collection system.

Malunga was nonetheless skeptical with the new Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) methodology.

“The authenticity of this new methodology is questionable because we have not tried it before,” he said.

Dr. Malunga said it could have been better if both the new and old methodologies were used together in order to compare their results.

On her part, MVAC Chairperson, Victoria Geresomo, described the disbanding proposal as “not a good idea.”

“MVAC is an independent committee as such our figures are not altered in any way,” she said while stressing that the committee agrees first before taking the figures straight to the public.

MVAC started its operations in Malawi in 2002 following a food insecurity situation that the country experienced in 2001.

Over the years the committee has been under fire over its questionable assessment of the hunger situation in Malawi.