Indonesia yesterday launched an ambitious US$4.3 billion free-meal program to combat stunted growth due to malnutrition, a key election promise of President Prabowo Subianto.
Prabowo has pledged to provide nutritious meals free to tens of millions of schoolchildren and pregnant women, saying it would improve their quality of life and boost economic growth.
“This is historic for Indonesia for the first time conducting a nationwide nutrition program for toddlers, students, pregnant and breastfeeding mothers,” presidential spokesman Hasan Nasbi said late on Sunday.
Photo: AFP
At least 190 kitchens run by third-party catering services opened nationwide, including some run by military bases, and were busy preparing meals from midnight before distributing them to schoolchildren and pregnant women.
Second-grader Khalifa Eldrian beamed after finishing his free lunch of rice, chicken, vegetables and a banana at an elementary school in East Jakarta.
“I’m happy because the food was delicious... I can concentrate more when studying,” he said.
Photo: EPA-EFE
The government has allocated 10,000 rupiah (US$0.62) per meal and has a budget of 71 trillion rupiah for the 2025 fiscal year. It is set to deliver meals to almost 83 million people by 2029.
Stunting affects 21.5 percent of children in the archipelago of about 282 million people. The nation aims to reduce the rate to 5 percent by 2045.
Staff in a kitchen in Bogor, West Java, had worked tirelessly since just after midnight.
“We serve different menus every day, it has to be different so children won’t get bored,” staff member Ayu Pertiwi said.
Ayu said they were serving fairly nutritious meals such as eggs and fish even with the limited budget, although meat would likely only be served twice a month.
“We can still create various menus, but the options are limited. For us, the most important thing is the meal is nutritious,” she said.
The program was met with skepticism from experts when it was first announced during last year’s election campaign.
Tan Shot Yen, a Jakarta-based nutritionist and doctor, said trials late last year were mostly conducted in urban centers and assessments were not made available to the public.
She said the government needed transparent monitoring and robust food safety management to prevent hazards and the inclusion of unhealthy processed products, such as instant noodles and sausages.
“I hope this program is not just a temporary charitable effort to fulfill political promises,” she said. “To continue it for the long term, the government should focus not only on funding, but also on empowering communities so [recipients] are not simply reliant on free meals once a day while struggling to find food for the other two meals,” she said.
Analysts have said the scheme is not sustainable in the long term.
“I am quite pessimistic if everything is shouldered by the central government. Economically, it’s not sustainable,” said Aditya Alta, a public policy analyst from the Center for Indonesian Policy Studies think tank.
“Stunting is a multidimensional issue and addressing it through just one approach is insufficient,” he said.
‘UNUSUAL EVENT’: The Australian defense minister said that the Chinese navy task group was entitled to be where it was, but Australia would be watching it closely The Australian and New Zealand militaries were monitoring three Chinese warships moving unusually far south along Australia’s east coast on an unknown mission, officials said yesterday. The Australian government a week ago said that the warships had traveled through Southeast Asia and the Coral Sea, and were approaching northeast Australia. Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles yesterday said that the Chinese ships — the Hengyang naval frigate, the Zunyi cruiser and the Weishanhu replenishment vessel — were “off the east coast of Australia.” Defense officials did not respond to a request for comment on a Financial Times report that the task group from
Asian perspectives of the US have shifted from a country once perceived as a force of “moral legitimacy” to something akin to “a landlord seeking rent,” Singaporean Minister for Defence Ng Eng Hen (黃永宏) said on the sidelines of an international security meeting. Ng said in a round-table discussion at the Munich Security Conference in Germany that assumptions undertaken in the years after the end of World War II have fundamentally changed. One example is that from the time of former US president John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address more than 60 years ago, the image of the US was of a country
DEFENSE UPHEAVAL: Trump was also to remove the first woman to lead a military service, as well as the judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force US President Donald Trump on Friday fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of US military leadership. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he would nominate former lieutenant general Dan “Razin” Caine to succeed Brown, breaking with tradition by pulling someone out of retirement for the first time to become the top military officer. The president would also replace the head of the US Navy, a position held by Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead a military service,
BLIND COST CUTTING: A DOGE push to lay off 2,000 energy department workers resulted in hundreds of staff at a nuclear security agency being fired — then ‘unfired’ US President Donald Trump’s administration has halted the firings of hundreds of federal employees who were tasked with working on the nation’s nuclear weapons programs, in an about-face that has left workers confused and experts cautioning that the Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE’s) blind cost cutting would put communities at risk. Three US officials who spoke to The Associated Press said up to 350 employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) were abruptly laid off late on Thursday, with some losing access to e-mail before they’d learned they were fired, only to try to enter their offices on Friday morning
RSS