'MBG': An Epitome of Recentralization?

The country is once again facing a tragedy as a result of the Indonesian central government's policy: the free nutritious meal program (abbreviated: MBG). Though the program is not called the free poisonous meal program, it has indeed caused mass mass-poisoning recently. The government's responses towards critiques and moratorium-calls are overwhelmingly elitists and ignorant. A minister said that it's rather the school pupils who have not adjusted their stomach to the food while reminiscing his most likely made-up childhood experience of diarrhea after drinking milk for the first time – as if all of the poisoned pupils suffer from milk problems. The president himself resorts to similar argument, locating the problem in the Indonesian 'local customs [adat istiadat]' of eating with one's hands, not with spoon – a 'hygienist' speculation which precedence historian Honggare found in colonial time. Indeed, many Indonesian kids do not wash their hands before eating – as reported by many nutritionists and I have also seen myself in my own unrelated field studies in some coastal kampung in Jakarta – and that shall change, but that is not how the MBG food poisoning occurred! Many critical local actors have instead identified the problems within the kitchen and food processing organizations itself.

The issues, however, seemed to be reckoned as mere small dots in the overall glory and success of the national program, which the president indulged in bragging about. The annual Independence Day's presidential speech in the parliament was full of boasting of his administration's 'achievements', including retelling of praises by the international communities for MBG's successful and rapidly massive implementation – including by Brazil, which also implemented similar policy.

My take is that the food poisoning only shows one facet of the broader, multidimensional failures of this policy. Its intention one could appreciate well enough, but not its execution. The noble goal was to end stunting – a condition still suffered by an unbelievable number of Indonesian kids, one-third of them. On this, though, nutritionists and even other presidential candidates have long argued the opposite: stunting has to be tackled from the moment a child is conceived and born, not starting too late at school age. The implementation has been fishy from the beginning, tied to MBG-related election promises that spokesmen Hashim and Habiburokhman framed in a very simplistic way – saying that getting 400 trillion rupiah would be easy and wouldn’t distort the state budget. The next promise was that this would create jobs in kitchens and set local economies in motion across districts and villages. By now, everyone knows those promises are broken.

Early Skepticism at Forum PPI Jerman, April 2024

As my friends and I – including some Sagonese co-founders – were active in the PPI Jerman, in April 2024, we invited some experts on a roundtable discussion (named Forum PPI Jerman) to discuss the policy. We rented a room in TU Berlin with the hope that broader Indonesian students could join and also learn about some Indonesian affairs despite living abroad. Some thirty students attended the discussion. The roundtable was one of the rare occasions where some experts and the public could really participate in serious and lengthy discussions on MBG. The result of the discussions were a video and some other unpublished writings by my friends from the Riset dan Kajian Strategis Department staffs – on which this text is based.

It was joined by one of the consultants, hired by Prabowo's team for ideating the early draft of MBG, a lead-economists of an Indonesian think-tank called CORE and a professor in an Universitas Indonesia's institute. Another invitee, who cancelled in the last minutes was a PSI politician, who at that time, told me that the team and him/her was doing some trials in some villages in West Java and thus unable to attend. Otherwise, the his/her team couldn't yet unveil anything, because the program was still under its prototyping. I found that argument strange: wasn't it a perfect timing for them to disclose their works and get inputs for? Also, I found it also odd that although MBG was supposed to be the program of the president-elect, but due to the political tie formed by the in-power president, Jokowi, with the president-elect Prabowo serving as his minister, the in-power president decided to start testing the policy of a president-elect he supported. (Wasn't it already fishy and not supposed to happen? Wasn't it another form of misuse of power? that an in-power president uses his term to test the program of a president-elect he has supported?)

Now, to the substance of the roundtable. The invited economist was perplexed from the beginning of his presentation until his last words. He said that it was basically impossible to suddenly create 400 trillion out of the very packed state's budget (APBN 2024) Indonesia had. Even the discretionary budget (28%), which can be reallocated for other purposes at the government's will could hardly cover the program's gigantic cost and was anyway about to shrink further due to the increase of government debt payment. Also, changing the discretionary budget in a sudden would also cause chaos, which manifests in the abrupt termination of the myriads of other programs whose unintended consequences nobody could foresee. He compared the gigantic cost with the cost of the existing, entire social protection program (491 trillion), which the government has increasingly implemented across decades, to point out at the sheer disproportionality of the MBG program's cost. At the macro level, he expresses the need to consider the possible inflation for food products' price which would come with the sudden demand increase of food caused by MBG. Thus, slowly is the only way to implement the program, both from the point of view of fiscal possibility and food market capacity. Last, but not least, he warns of the tendency of corruptive behavior in the process of tenders for such big, nation-wide projects, which will become impossible to monitor.

The consultant aimed to explain about the current grave state of stunting in Indonesia, and why the program could actually help. She also mentioned that such a policy is globally implemented by more than 130 countries and referred to the World Free Lunch Indonesia was not yet part of. The irony is that, despite the super high rate of stunting in Indonesia, which varied regionally and acutely concerning Papua's provinces, Indonesia is one of the top food-wasting countries. The issue of food access was thus crucial, and the program could theoretically address this by redistributing food for children in need. She pointed also at the fact that 80% of Indonesian milk consumption comes from imported milk, along with various imported vegetables and fruit products, including even rice. As much as Indonesia's historical food policy trend is concerned, which Prabowo has steadily adopted in his long-years political campaigns, national food self-sufficiency has always been the championed and unchanging jargon. However, the contrary is reality: import has been crucial to fill in Indonesian consumption. Food import would thus seem to her as inevitable, but the demand increase could be seen as a big change for the local producers to benefit from, if the right incentives be given.

From Universitas Indonesia, the researcher pointed out the first related questions which must be tackled: the question of financing and the real-time food or agricultural product-related data in each Indonesian region. He urges the team to think of creative ways to finance the program which will otherwise burden the tight Indonesian fiscal capacity. In short, he reminds us to look at the existing, myriads of various actors related to food provision at schools in local scales – the canteens, food banks, school farming, or community initiatives. It will be wise to start from them, thus start locally, following the credo of Indonesian Reformasi Era – decentralization, for the fund could then benefit the existing market actors or even invite more market actors in the grass-root. If the decentralization principle is adopted, various local actors could also join, for instance local research institutes which could also drive further the efficiency of the program, the food diversification topic and the nutrition concerned. That way, the issue with real-time food or agricultural product market analysis could also be done by various institutions, not only by a single state institution of BPS which monopoly of often poor data provision is unchallenged. He also directs the attention to the careful launch of the project: little by little, and targeted to those regions which need the universal free meals the most. For that reason, he thinks of a conditional cash transfer method, like the Kartu Prakerja, which could render the demographic targeting of the most-needing better implementable. I read his considerations as representing a more pro-liberal stance, where rational and local market actors are supposed to be the ones in charge, while the state kind of monitors and ideates the bigger picture.

Dreams [Nightmares] Come True ...

Almost all the cautions, critiques and suggestions read above are just in put to the world in vain. Since Prabowo Administration was active from October 2024 and has implemented MBG, only wrong things occurred. The election promise of not taking away any existing state's budget was a lie, proven by the government's radical budget's efficiency in myriad of various programs one-sidedly decided by the central government as non-essential as well as an unprecedented cut in the intergovernmental budget transfer (Dana Transfer Pusat ke Daerah, including Village Fund) – a radical step-back for the Indonesian Reformasi agenda, a way back to a recentralization. Both were associated widely with the state's budget reallocation for financing MBG.

The provision system of MBG meals is also not as promised. TNI has opened various kitchen facilities and also trained some ten of thousands future MBG kitchen managers. What does a military unit have to do with food provision? Salim Said, the most prominent Indonesian military historian and advisor, once said that military apparatus is there to train soldiers to defend the country, not for doing agriculture and running kitchens. The public generally fears the comeback of military apparatus in jumping into civilian stuff – something which Prabowo's former father-in-law had established and Reformasi tried to remedy. Not only TNI, nepotism in MBG kitchen tender process is reported to be overwhelming with many politician in national and provincial levels benefiting from their political capital. The food trays, something which can be produced with various creative and local solutions, are even standardized and have become playthings for big manufacturing companies – again not benefiting MSMEs as promised.

My source told me a story of a food UMKM (MSME) entrepreneur who was attracted by the program and wanted to follow the tendering process. The entrepreneur, however, quickly realized that the condition is just impossible to achieve. The various requirements of standardized kitchen, massive food deliveries and its payment won't allow any MSME to possibly join – since the initial capital required is just too big for real MSME. Many MSME actors thus had already the hunch from early on, that the program's tendering was for other bigger actors, but clearly not for them.

The program, thus, spectacularly fails to engage local MSMEs. Local economies with its various informal actors must face the unfamiliar and impossible centralized and top-down policy which the BGN (National Nutrition Agency) had unilaterally imposed. The kejar target-nature of the policy simply does not allow any meaningful discussions on implementation methods which stem from local potentialities – MBG just becomes another central government's program which political elites benefit from the most.

Directly associated with the meals provision done by political elites and TNI units is the massive wave of food poisoning. As admitted by the head of BGN, himself an insect expert, those actors are new, have had no background and thus must go through a trial-and-error process in food provision. If mass food-poisoning is considered as a 'normal' part of the process, then there is something seriously wrong in the thinking process of the executors of MBG. Some local government heads end up protesting the cooking process which is not conducted properly – being cooked the day before, kept in tightly closed metal trays and served after the food turns bad.

The latter critique was posed by Yogyakarta's Governor, who indeed had successfully run some massive food provision program during the 2006 earthquake disaster period for the victims. He followed up by mentioning the capacity of local food providers, which can't be forced to comply with a standardized, massive provision target. The governor's case shall enlighten us about another experience of a similar government program, which was run on decentralized principle: with local policy makers knowing the local market and conditions.

Reflection: Embed MBG in Local Institutions

When a national structure is established, it is normally hard to undo. That is the lessons we get in various sectors, including national forestry, monocultural agriculture, unified food policy, transmigration, and national education, where local actors have no options other than adapting a new life reshaped by national policies. Forming the national structure, kitchens by elites and state apparatus as well as centrally-imposed standard regulations have colored MBG's initial stage – and in current trajectories will be its constant color in the coming years.

For its size, MBG – and any policy – implemented nation-wide in Indonesia automatically gets into a panacea problem – which Sekar and I have argued elsewhere: because Indonesia's size is as big as a size of a continent filled with some tens of different countries which naturally would implement same-purposed programs differently with regards to their regional variations in local economic and social systems. Imagine if the European Union imposed the same kitchen rule applied in Munich elsewhere in Barcelona – it would never occur, for everyone in the EU knows that each place must solve the same problem differently. Institutional diversity should be regarded as strength and starting point – not as obstacles to circumvent with unilaterally ideated and implemented programs.

If I can imagine wildly, this is how MBG ideally takes place. I imagine a school attended by pupils coming from some villages in the region. Both canteen and parents normally provide food for the pupils. Between those villages, some manufacturers have operated since a long time ago. I imagine that the local government would ask those manufactures to direct their CSR funds for funding free meals in the schools. The local government also assesses and makes a list of students in that school who desperately need the free meals. A recent Celios survey identifies that the program is perceived as helpful especially by those families with an income of lower than two millions rupiah. With the list of needing students, the local government could then allocate the mix of private fund from the companies and obtained state's MBG budget for investing in some villages who have the initiatives to create a sort of cooperatives for the adult women members of their villages, – for the sake of argument – who wish to get more income and want to allocate their time starting from 4 A.M in the kitchen. Local MBG's agency only prescribes minimally the menu or nutrition elements which should be in the food box in whatever combinations the kitchen decides for, and they will schedule some spontaneous food checking accordingly. Though many parts of this daydream are not yet so realistic, I just want to convey the message that there are many other localized and diverse implementation possibilities one can imagine for MBG.

Unfortunately, again, the government's policy is going in the opposite direction: cut for the state's budget of regional governments – who have been rendered powerless for their structural impotency in raising tax revenues – and reducing Village Fund. Those are the instruments everyone hoped to be empowered for running the program – everybody is disappointed. Even if some years in the future, MBG will stop poisoning school pupils, it would still have missed its chance to really create a genuinely local movement, where local actors could be proud to have cooperated and successfully contributed to the program. Another repeating old song of centralization.

Author:

Geraldus Martimbang is doctoral student at the Technical University of Munich, where he researches the social, economic, and spatial history of colonial tea plantations in Priangan, West Java.