By The Diplomat | Created at 2026-06-05 10:58:05 | Updated at 2026-06-07 14:15:26
2 days ago
ASEAN Beat | Society | Southeast Asia
The program has come under scrutiny for its implementation and high cost, which is set to total nearly $15 billion in 2026.
The Indonesian agency overseeing President Prabowo Subianto’s multibillion-dollar free meals program will seek to improve the efficiency of the scheme and prioritize servicing more remote areas, its head said yesterday.
The Free Nutritious Meals program, known by its Indonesian acronym MBG, is among the most important of Prabowo’s social policies, and was among his main campaign promises during the presidential election of 2024. Its aim was to provide free meals to 83 million children and pregnant women across Indonesia.
Addressing the press in Jakarta yesterday, Nanik Sudaryati Deyang, the new head of the National Nutrition Agency (BGN), which is administering the program, said that the agency would seek to “refocus” in a number of priority areas.
“The refocusing measures are aimed at ensuring more efficient use of available resources through stronger governance, improved service quality, optimization of existing operational kitchens, and more targeted delivery of benefits, particularly in underserved and remote areas,” she said, as per Reuters. She added, “Our primary concern is efficiency.”
Nanik, a former journalist, was appointed to head the program on Wednesday, shortly after her predecessor Dadan Hindayana was sacked and arrested for corruption. The Attorney-General’s Office has charged the former BGN head with causing state losses and enriching himself in connection with his administration of the MBG program. If found guilty, he could face a maximum 20-year prison sentence. Two deputy heads of BGN were also dismissed from their posts and arrested.
The MBG program is intended to tackle stunting, a condition caused by malnutrition that affects a fifth of children below the age of five in Indonesia. But its high cost has attracted scrutiny. The program had reached 62 million beneficiaries as of April 30, at a cost of 75 trillion rupiah ($4.24 billion), Finance Minister Purbaya Yudhi Sadewa said last month. But he added that the government planned to trim further the budget allocation for 2026 from 335 trillion rupiah ($18.6 billion) to 268 trillion rupiah ($14.9 billion), in light of budget pressures, which the impacts of the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and the global oil supply shock have compounded.
Nanik added yesterday that her agency hoped “to reduce it further without compromising quality.”
The program has also experienced a number of implementation problems. Last year, there were several food poisoning outbreaks connected to the MBG program, suggesting that corners were being cut in the drive to roll out the program rapidly across the full expanse of the Indonesian archipelago.
The arrest of the former head of the BGN on corruption charges only underlines the challenges in administering such a logistically complex scheme in a transparent and effective way.
Nanik added that the BGN would temporarily suspend any MBG kitchen found to be operating “below established standard operating procedures,” in the paraphrase of the state news agency Antara.
Speaking during a national consolidation meeting on the MBG program in Bogor, West Java, on Wednesday, Prabowo declared that the program must succeed and that those unwilling to perform their duties properly must “step aside.”
“What matters most is that the interests of the people come before all other interests,” the Indonesian leader said.
