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View all search resultsEmpty jargon cannot fill families' wallets
Glossy ribbons and technocratic jargon may sound good in press releases, but only affordable food and verified results can win the public’s trust.
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Police officers and health workers respond on Jan. 29, 2026, to suspected mass food poisoning cases linked to the free nutritious meal program at SMA 2 Kudus senior high school in the capital of Kudus regency, Central Java. (Antara/Nirza)
T
here is something almost tragicomic about the government’s public communication today. On the main stage, officials cut ceremonial ribbons, announce hundreds of thousands of hectares of newly opened agricultural land and parade fashionable technocratic catchphrases: food security, supply chain orchestration, integrated food estate. Yet when mothers walk into a traditional market, they do not encounter a bureaucratic success chart. They face stubborn rice prices that refuse to drop and staple food supplies that remain volatile.
This encapsulates the widening disconnect in government messaging: an abundance of institutional jargon with virtually no tangible evidence that translates to the dinner table or the family wallet.
President Prabowo Subianto’s administration has set out an ambitious agenda to build food sovereignty through integrated production areas that run from the upstream to the downstream. The scale of this ambition merits serious deliberation.
Public support, however, cannot be won through spectacular claims from a podium. Trust cannot be decreed into existence through highway billboards or glossy posts on official social media feeds; it must be earned incrementally through benefits citizens can actually see and feel.
Consider the subsidized cooking gas debacle of February 2025. The government restricted the retail sale of 3-kilogram LPG cylinders to designated distributors, instantly bottlenecking supplies and forcing citizens into long, frustrating queues. President Prabowo eventually had to order retailers to resume sales, prompting Energy and Mineral Resources Minister Bahlil Lahadalia to issue a public apology.
The policy’s failure was fundamentally inseparable from its messaging: A reform purportedly designed to optimize distribution confronted households with abrupt scarcity. Explaining an abstract policy objective will never satisfy a family asking a basic, urgent question: Where can we buy cooking gas today?
The official response to food poisoning incidents linked to the free nutritious meal program provides a second cautionary tale. In November 2025, National Nutrition Agency (BGN) head Dadan Hindayana informed lawmakers that the program accounted for 211 of 441 recorded food poisoning cases nationwide. The administration defended the program by emphasizing that these cases represented a statistically negligible fraction of total meals served.
