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Free meal program faces hurdles on food safety, funds management
Calls have grown for President Prabowo Subianto’s administration to suspend and reevaluate its flagship free nutritious meals program amid cases of food poisoning and a report of embezzlement of funds earmarked for the initiative.
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Students eat lunches on Sept. 26, 2024, as part of a trial of the free nutritious meals program during their break time at school in Sukabumi, West Java. (REUTERS/Willy Kurniawan)
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lmost four months into the rollout of the free nutritious meals program, President Prabowo Subianto recently boasted about its achievements, claiming that he had heard praise from officials in other countries about the initiative’s rapid expansion when compared to similar programs in other countries.
When the program was first launched on Jan. 6, it aimed to feed 600,000 recipients, mostly schoolchildren. The number gradually grew to 3 million recipients by April, before officials expanded the targeted population to 82.9 million students and pregnant women by the end of 2025.
But cracks have started to appear amid the rapid scaling up of President Prabowo’s flagship program, with the initiative meeting challenges from food poisoning and budgetary issues surrounding the kitchen providing the meal packages.
The expansion was followed by an increase in the number of food poisoning cases, which many blamed due to a lack of food quality control measures implemented by the thousands of food science and nutrition graduates recruited for the program.
One recent incident took place in Cianjur regency, West Java, where at least 165 students were admitted to the hospital for food poisoning after consuming the free meal packages.
The students came from two schools in the regency, namely MAN 1 Cianjur state Islamic senior high school and SMP PGRI 1 Cianjur junior high school. The high number of patients forced the regency administration to declare a state of emergency in the region.
The West Java Health Agency analyzed samples from the kitchen and vomit from the patients to check for possible microbe contamination, while the Cianjur Health Agency suspended meal production of the nutrition fulfilment service unit (SPPG) producing the meals, as reported by kompas.id on Saturday.
