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resident Joko '€œJokowi'€ Widodo has instructed his ministers to thoroughly evaluate the subsidized rice-for-the-poor (raskin) program after he claimed to have found serious problems with it.

Recounting his experience during field visits, the President claimed to have found that some of the rice was inedible.

Some of the rice is sold two or three years after its expiration date, with some of it having turned murky and even containing fungus by the time it was received by the poor, Jokowi noted.

'€œThe raskin is an integral part of our people'€™s social protection program,'€ the President told his ministers as he opened a limited Cabinet meeting on the issue on Monday. '€œI want the rice to be distributed in really, really good quality.'€

Raskin, formerly known as a special market operation (OPK), is a cross-sector national program that has been implemented every year since 1998.

The program was introduced to improve the poor'€™s access to rice, the main staple food of Indonesia'€™s 250 million people, with its distribution involving the State Logistics Agency (Bulog) and other ministries.

From 2005 to 2009, the government distributed between 1.6 and 3.2 million tons of rice every year under the raskin program, with its price set at Rp 1,000 (7 US cents) to Rp 1,600 per kilogram, according to Bulog data.

During the meeting at the State Palace, Jokowi also called for an overhaul in the distribution of raskin, as some of the cheap rice apparently failed to reach the targeted poor households.

'€œOur findings show that the raskin recipient list includes affluent households. [The raskin recipient data] needs to be verified and re-evaluated,'€ said the President.

Commenting on the issue, Social Affairs Minister Khofifah Indar Parawansa said Monday that her ministry would reassess the quality of the raskin program, as well as the data on recipients.

Based on the ministry'€™s findings, the poor quality raskin '€” expired rice that had turned murky and contained fungus '€” was found in rice warehouses in Java, while that distributed outside the island was usually of good quality, she said.

'€œJava is the hub of rice production, and so much of the rice there was stockpiled for a very long time instead of being distributed in a timely manner.

So we need to address this issue in the warehouses in Java by ensuring that they comply to the first-in-first out rice distribution policy,'€ Khofifah told reporters.

Another issue in the raskin program was the fact that local regional leaders failed to distribute the rice on time to the targeted households, said Coordinating Economic Minister Sofyan Djalil.

The government will coordinate with local leaders to resolve the issue and ease distribution of rice for the poor as demanded by the President, Sofyan said.

Jokowi has won local support for his firm stance against imports of crucial food commodities, but his anti-import policy has been blamed for the recent acceleration in inflation, notably food inflation, with rice prices soaring by more than 30 percent year-on-year only several months after he took office.

In February, Jokowi directly spearheaded the market operation to stabilize rice prices at Bulog rice warehouses in Jakarta, where the government began distributing raskin at Rp 1,600 per kilogram to stabilize rice prices, which at that time rose to as high as Rp 12,000 per kilogram.

At that time, some of the supposedly high-quality rice sold in the market was found to have been mixed with low-quality raskin.

Earlier this month, Jokowi fired then Bulog chairwoman Lenny Sugihat as the agency was deemed unsuccessful in the absorption of rice stocks and the distribution of raskin.