February 27, 2026 | 04:25 pm
TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - PDI-P politician Said Abdullah calls for the evaluation of the free nutritious meal (MBG) project, including the number of beneficiaries.
According to him, distributing free meals for up to 3,000 students in each public kitchen is not effective. "The scale could be reduced from 3,000 per SPPG (Nutrition Fulfillment Service Units) to a maximum of 1,500 to 2,000 students," he said in a written statement on Friday, February 27, 2026.
The Chair of the Budget Committee of the House of Representatives believes that a smaller beneficiary scale allows the kitchens to cook more quickly and ensure the food "remains hygienic."
Moreover, he said that the free nutritious meal project is part of government efforts to improve children's nutritional intake. According to him, the average prevalence of chronic malnutrition in Indonesian children reaches 19 percent, way above WHO standards at 10 percent.
The free nutritious meals have targeted 60 million recipients as of January 2026, with a total of 22,091 SPPGs operational since the program kicked off last year.
President Prabowo Subianto claimed that the implementation of MBG by his government has been successful. According to him, this can be seen from the larger number of beneficiaries compared to the cases of MBG poisoning.
“If we compare the number of poisoning cases to the billions of meals we have distributed, the figure is 0.0087 percent,” Prabowo said. “That means 99.99 percent of the MBG program can be considered successful.”
Prabowo, who also chairs the Gerindra Party, claimed that experts from the White House in the United States have expressed interest in studying the program.
He added that the Rockefeller Institute has described MBG as one of the best investments a country can make.
The president has repeatedly highlighted the program’s performance. Earlier, during a retreat of the Red and White Cabinet at his private residence in Hambalang, Bogor, on January 6, 2026, he said internal evaluations showed the program’s implementation had reached a 99 percent success rate.
Prabowo emphasized that MBG is a strategic initiative rooted in the state’s responsibility to address child nutrition, citing studies indicating that more than 20 to 30 percent of Indonesian children suffer from malnutrition.
Ervana Trikarinaputri contributed to the writing of this article
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