Government Affirms No New Free Nutritious Meal Kitchens During Restructuring Period

Coordinating Minister for Food Zulkifli Hasan has affirmed that no new kitchens will be opened for the Free Nutritious Meal (MBG) programme during a period of governance restructuring. “During this restructuring, there are indeed no new ones yet. We are sorting things out internally first,” said Zulhas, as he is familiarly known, during a press conference on improving MBG service quality at the Coordinating Ministry for Food office in Jakarta on Thursday. Zulhas stated that over the next month, the government will focus on addressing various findings so the programme can run as expected. In that month, Zulhas committed to organising and rectifying Nutrition Fulfilment Service Unit (SPPG) points that had been traded, mapping recipient schools, improving kitchen quality, and verifying reports on MBG beneficiaries. Zulhas disclosed an inflation of 6,877 SPPG points, causing potential wastage of up to Rp12 trillion per year. “The initial plan was for 21,000 points, but now there are 27,877 points. That is a bloat of 6,877 points,” Zulhas said. Additionally, there was an inflation of SPPG points in disadvantaged, frontier, and outermost (3T) regions from the initial target of 2,000 to 8,617 points. “A thorough restructuring by the Head of BGN and the new management is needed to fix this very important programme,” Zulhas noted. Head of the National Nutrition Agency (BGN) Nanik S Deyang stated that the agency is implementing several budget efficiency measures to ensure the programme does not burden state finances without changing nutritional fulfilment targets for beneficiaries. The first step is a moratorium on opening new points and kitchens. To date, there are 27,877 operational kitchen points based on virtual accounts, which will be reorganised to assess service capacity alignment with the number of beneficiaries in each region. The BGN has also temporarily suspended new kitchen registrations while mapping needs across various regions. This restructuring is being conducted because the distribution of kitchens remains concentrated on the island of Java. The next step is refocusing beneficiaries so nutritional interventions are more directed towards groups that genuinely need them. An evaluation is being conducted on the number of beneficiaries, currently recorded at around 63 million people.