Prabowo's free meals program is big, costly, and leaking money

President Prabowo Subianto recently replaced the head of the National Nutrition Agency (BGN), which runs his Free Nutritious Meals program (MBG). Writing for Fulcrum, Isabelle Chua argues that swapping leaders will not fix the real problem, because the trouble is built into how the program is designed. The former head, Dadan Hindayana, and two deputies now face charges of rigging contracts, marking up prices, and stealing money, only months after they were given top state honours.

The program is huge. It eats up nearly 7 percent of the whole state budget and feeds 62.4 million people, more than Indonesia spends on either its military or its police. The government has already trimmed the 2026 budget for it from 335 trillion to 268 trillion rupiah (about 14.7 billion US dollars). The meals are cooked in nearly 28,000 kitchens, and this is where the money leaks. Many kitchens are run by private foundations that are often controlled by politicians or military officers, who earn a fixed profit on every meal served. In one case a local politician's daughter controls 41 kitchens; elsewhere a former official's son runs 16.

Chua calls this "rent-seeking": using a public program mainly to make private profit. The rush to open kitchens has also come with weak safety checks. Since 2025 more than 33,000 students have been made sick by the food. She contrasts MBG with Posyandu, a long-running community health scheme that works because parents, teachers, and local officials all take part. MBG shut those people out and handed the job to contractors chasing margins. The new leader promises school kitchens and a tighter focus on poor regions, but without changing the contractor model, the waste and corruption will stay.

Why it matters

If you have children in a state school, this is the program feeding them, so the food-safety failures are not abstract. Every rupiah lost to markups and fake contracts is money not spent on schools, health, or softening prices, and the program is so large that its leaks strain the whole budget. Watch whether the new leadership touches the contractor system or just changes the name at the top.