June 15, 2026
JAKARTA – President Prabowo Subianto’s flagship free nutritious meals program to combat stunting and malnutrition has faced intense public scrutiny since its launch early last year, owing to what many view as an overly ambitious target of reaching nearly 83 million students and pregnant women nationwide, as well as its massive budget allocation.
This year’s budget was initially set at Rp 335 trillion (US$18.65 billion) before being reduced to Rp 268 trillion to improve efficiency and sharpen targeting, amid reports that some beneficiaries, particularly from middle-income households, had rejected the program over concerns about food quality, nutritional value and safety.
Adding to those concerns, the Indonesian Education Monitoring Network (JPPI) reported that more than 37,000 students nationwide experienced food poisoning after consuming meals distributed through the program between January 2025 and May 2026.
The initiative has also been tainted by allegations of budget markups and corruption, with the Attorney General’s Office (AGO) detaining and naming three former leaders of the National Nutrition Agency (BGN), which administers the program, as suspects just a day after they were removed from their positions on June 2.
These developments have exposed the risks of prioritizing rapid expansion over sound governance and quality control. While the objective of improving children’s nutrition and reducing stunting remains commendable, the government must acknowledge that a program of this scale cannot be judged solely by the number of beneficiaries it reaches.
Upon being appointed BGN head on June 8, former deputy head for public communications and investigation Nanik S. Deyang pledged to improve the program’s governance by prioritizing budget efficiency and service quality over simply expanding the number of beneficiaries.
The shift signals a departure from President Prabowo’s emphasis on rapid expansion. On several occasions, the President has lauded the program’s growth, citing its ability to reach 55 million beneficiaries within a year, compared with Brazil’s school feeding program, which took 11 years to serve 40 million recipients. Yet the success of such a nutrition program should not be measured by the speed or scale of its rollout, but by its ability to improve outcomes among those who need intervention the most.
Nanik said the current beneficiary pool of 63 million people would be reviewed to ensure the program genuinely targets groups most in need of nutritional intervention. She also announced a moratorium on the construction of new meal-production kitchens to allow the agency to focus on improving the tens of thousands of kitchens already in operation, many of them concentrated on Java.
The planned improvements, including upgrading facilities, strengthening operational systems and enhancing staff capacity, are steps in the right direction. Likewise, the decision to continue expanding the program in disadvantaged, frontier and outermost (3T) regions while encouraging greater collaboration with state-owned enterprises and the private sector could help reduce the burden on the state budget.
Most importantly, the program’s priority beneficiaries will shift toward pregnant women, breastfeeding mothers and young children, reflecting evidence that nutritional interventions are most effective during pregnancy and the first years of life.
We welcome this more structured and targeted approach. The free nutritious meals program should never have been conceived as a universal entitlement since the very beginning. In a country where resources are finite and nutritional challenges vary widely across regions and income groups, a one-size-fits-all approach risks wasting public funds while diluting the program’s impact.
The government should therefore remain committed to this course correction, even if it means scaling back some of its initial ambitions. Success should not be measured by how many meals are distributed or how many beneficiaries are counted, but by whether the program improves nutritional outcomes, reduces stunting and reaches those who need help the most.
A more focused, accountable and evidence-based program may not produce headline-grabbing numbers. But it stands a far better chance of delivering meaningful results and becoming a lasting legacy for President Prabowo’s administration.