Indonesia has announced a number of changes to its Free Nutritious Meals program, a flagship policy of President Prabowo Subianto’s administration, in order to reduce the pressure on the government budget.
Agustina Arumsari, deputy head of the National Nutrition Agency (BGN), which is administering the multibillion-dollar program, said late Thursday that the program would be suspended during the upcoming school holidays from June 22 to July 13, and all future school holidays, Reuters reported.
The changes were about “budget efficiency” and would also “ensure that every resource owned by the state truly provides optimal benefits for the groups in need,” she added.
The agency will also stop funding meals for around 39,000 students in 76 schools in areas judged to have the economic capacity to meet nutritional needs, and shift the capacity to students in remote areas. The government plans to propose reducing the budget allocated to the program for 2027.
“We think the figure is too big,” Arumsari said, Reuters reported. “With the budget we have, we can cut back and make it more efficient.”
Suspending the service during the school holidays is expected to save the BGN more than 3 trillion rupiah ($168 million) in the upcoming holiday period, and Agustina added that the hiatus would give officials a chance to reassess the scheme and “ensure that the free nutritious meal program becomes more accurately targeted.”
The Free Nutritious Meals program, known by its Indonesian acronym MBG, was among Prabowo’s main campaign promises during the presidential election of 2024. Its aim is to provide free meals to 83 million children and pregnant women across Indonesia, in a bid to prevent stunting due to poor nutrition. As the BGN put it in a recent post on its Facebook page, “by providing good and balanced nutrition, we are building a strong foundation so that this next generation will grow into healthy, intelligent, and resilient individuals.”
Since its inception, however, many have questioned the high cost of the program. The program had cost 75 trillion rupiah ($4.24 billion) in the year to April 30, Finance Minister Purbaya Yudhi Sadewa said last month. The government is currently budgeting 268 trillion rupiah ($15.1 billion) for the program for 2026.
These questions have only grown louder since Iran’s closure in March of the Strait of Hormuz, which has cost the government billions of dollars in subsidies intended to shield Indonesian consumers from the full effect of the rise in the global price of oil.
The program has also been dogged by several food poisoning incidents and allegations of corruption. Indeed, the changes announced late last week are a direct response to the sacking and arrest earlier this month of former BGN head Dadan Hindayana, who has been charged with causing state losses and enriching himself in connection with his administration of the MBG program. Two deputy heads of BGN were also dismissed from their posts and arrested.
All of these issues have prompted calls in some quarters for the government to scrap the program altogether. Earlier this month, hundreds of protesters in Jakarta held a demonstration calling for the cancellation of government policies they said could “bankrupt” the country. Among these was the MBG program.
As things stand, the Prabowo administration is unlikely to pay its critics the compliment of conceding to their demands. But it is likely to make further efforts to streamline the MBG program and target it at populations with a more genuine need before the end of Prabowo’s term in 2029.