29 September 2025 (closed)
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Economists and Professionals Urge Prabowo to Temporarily Halt Free Nutritious Meals Program
A total of 713 economists and professionals who are members of the Indonesian Economist Alliance called on Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto to temporarily halt the Free Nutritious Meals (Makan Bergizi Gratis) program while the program is being evaluated. Let's take a closer look at this program.
What is President Prabowo's Free Nutritious Meals Program?
The Free Nutritious Meals program (often called "Free Lunch Program") is a flagship national initiative with multiple objectives. The primary objective is to improve the nutritional status of Indonesia's younger generation by providing one free, balanced, and healthy meal on a daily basis. This is seen as a long-term investment to develop better quality human resources.
The program particularly targets at school children (from pre-school to high school), toddlers, as well as pregnant and breastfeeding women. The long-term target is to reach around 82-90 million beneficiaries across the Archipelago.
On the immediate term, the program brings economic benefit too by creating a guaranteed market for local farmers, livestock breeders, and fishermen (particularly the micro, small and medium-sized businesses) as the meals have to be prepared using locally sourced ingredients such as rice, eggs, vegetables, animal protein, and milk. Millions of people (jobs) need to be involved, such as cooks and distributors.
An Expensive Program
With a targeted 90 million beneficiaries, one can imagine that this free daily lunch program requires huge public funds. Initially, the Indonesian government allocated IDR 71 trillion (approx. USD $4.3 billion) in the 2025 State Budget for this program. However, despite slow execution at the start of the year, this budget might be set to increase. Moreover, in the 2026 State Budget, the government allocated a total of IDR 335 trillion (approx. USD $20.2 billion) for the Free Nutritious Meals program.
Table 1 shows that spending on the program has risen considerably since the beginning of 2025.
Table 1; Absorption of the Free Nutritious Meals Program in 2025:
| Month | Funds Used (IDR trillion) |
Realization (% of full budget) |
| January | 0.05 | 0.1 |
| February | 1.18 | 1.7 |
| March | 1.80 | 2.5 |
| April | 2.54 | 3.6 |
| May | 3.85 | 5.4 |
| June | 6.03 | 8.5 |
| July | 7.90 | 11.1 |
| August | 13.20 | 18.6 |
Source: Badan Gizi Nasional (National Nutrition Agency, BGN)
What Are the key Challenges?
Food Safety
Firstly, and this is the reason why we wrote this article, there have been problems related to food safety and hygiene. Unfortunately, there have been various cases of food poisoning linked to this program. According to the National Nutrition Agency (BGN), there were 70 food safety incidents (including contamination and poisoning) affecting a total of 5,914 beneficiaries nationwide between January and September 2025. However, other institutions report higher numbers, close to 9,000 victims. For example, in the third week of September 2025 more than 1,000 victims fell ill in West Java, complaining of nausea, dizziness, shortness of breath, and severe stomach pain.
Laboratory results often point to bacterial contamination (including E. coli, Salmonella, and Staphylococcus aureus) in food ingredients (water, rice, tofu, chicken) and cooked meals. These incidents also highlight issues with poor sanitation and hygiene practices in the Nutrition Fulfilment Service Units (SPPGs) or public kitchens, including in newly-established operations.
It is important to add here that these meals are distributed through a system involving SPPGs (for which the government works together with various partners, including police, military, and large Muslim organizations), which are essentially large, centralized public kitchens. While these kitchens need to prepare meals with strict hygiene standards before distributing them to schools and other community centres, this is not always the case.
Critics argue that there is the need to strictly enforce Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) to ensure proper cleaning of equipment and implement testing kits at all service units. Vivi Alatas, a representative of the Indonesian Economist Alliance (Aliansi Ekonom Indonesia, or AEI), said it is better to suspend the program due to the thousands of students that have experienced food poisoning.
Responding to the frequent food poisoning outbreaks linked to the program, President Prabowo said standards need to be improved. However, he also emphasized that the deviation rate from (general) food safety standards was very small, at only 0.000017 percent. Indeed, Indonesia is a country where food poisoning frequently occurs due to poor standards. It is estimated that total annual cases of diarrhoeal foodborne illness in Indonesia range between 10.2 million and 22.5 million cases.
Financial, Fiscal and Accountability Risks
In late September 2025, the AEI advised Indonesian Coordinating Minister for Economic Affairs, Airlangga Hartarto, to temporarily suspend the free meals program. In the AEI's words, "the economy is burdened by massive resource misallocation and the fragility of state-governing institutions due to conflicts of interest and dishonest governance." One example of that misallocation is the free nutritious meal program.
Lili Yan Ing, representative of the AEI, said in Indonesian media that the government must adjust its policy by using evidence-based approaches for handling three nutritional problems: stunting, obesity, and micronutrient deficiency. This includes adjusting the recipient targets and implementation to suit Indonesia's diverse local conditions. They suggested that the government change the nature of the free nutritious meal recipients from "universal" to "targeted". The government can fix the budget misallocation and align the program with its policy goals so that every rupiah spent by the government can be used effectively.
Based on national socio-economic surveys in 2024, out of every 80 million students, there is 1 percent (800,000 students) not eating lunch, and 4 percent (3.5 million students) not having enough food. According to Lili Yan Ing, those are the students the government needs to focus on. And if we assume an expense of IDR 10,000 per lunch, per student, then total expenses will be much lower than the allocated IDR 335 trillion in the 2026 State Budget. In fact, it will be closer to IDR 8 trillion (approx. USD $500 million).
Naturally, one of the key troubles with scaling down the program is that it is one of the key promises President Prabowo made during the presidential campaign in 2024. If millions of people won't get the free meal anymore, then they will be disappointed in the government and Prabowo.
Meanwhile, if a lot of public money is spent on the free nutritious meals program, then there are fewer funds for public investment in other social and economic development plans of the government such as core education quality improvements, teacher welfare, and infrastructure. This would particularly mean missed opportunities in case the free nutritious meals program is not performing as it should.
Moreover, when there are a lot of funds being channelled in this program, including thousands and thousands of kitchens, then it certainly opens room for corruption.
Operational and Logistical Challenges
Obviously, the sheer scale of the program in such a vast archipelago nation presents major hurdles. The enormous size of the program strains the capacity for proper quality control, while inexperience in mass cooking lead to slow cooking times, quality inconsistency, and food spoilage.
Meanwhile, poor infrastructure, unpaved roads, and a lack of adequate transportation in remote and underdeveloped regions make the timely distribution of fresh, safe, and nutritious food extremely difficult.