Hundreds of children have been poisoned in Indonesia after consuming free school meals, pushing some parents to avoid a flagship scheme intended to eliminate hunger.

In the largest mass-poisoning since the scheme launched in January, 400 people fell ill in Bengkulu, a province on the south-west coast of Sumatra island, with children as young as 12 being rushed to hospital.

The incident is the latest blow to the flagship policy of President Prabawo Subianto, a former general who was sworn into power last October with an ambitious plan to fight stunting and malnutrition by feeding more than 80 million people this year.

Mr Prabawo has said the initiative will turn the sprawling archipelago into a country “free from poverty, free from hunger”.

But the policy, which has a hefty price tag of 121 trillion rupiah (£5.5bn) in 2025 alone, has been beset by controversy.

Credit: Reuters

Demonstrations first erupted in February after it emerged ministries, including health and education, would suffer cuts of some £14bn to fund the meals. Protesters took to the streets with slogans like “children eat for free, parents are laid off” – the lavish budget reinforced a sense of irresponsible government spending, despite high unemployment and a persistent wealth gap.

The quality of the programme itself is also under scrutiny. Photos show school meals stuffed with ultra-processed foods, including biscuits and burgers, while food poisoning has been such a major problem that some parents have started telling their children not to eat the free food.

“The trust from parents, because they keep on seeing children having food poisoning, has significantly dropped,” Diah Saminarsih, founder and chief executive of the Centre for Indonesia’s Strategic Development Initiatives, told The Telegraph.

“We’ve heard parents say that, although their children could eat from the free meals programme, [they now] just bring the food and drink from home instead,” she said.

A school official also told the BBC that some parents have started packing homemade lunches for children, to avoid them having to eat the free meals.

According to the local government in Bengkulu, more than 400 students fell ill and children as young as 12 were rushed to a local hospital complaining of stomach pains.

The province’s vice governor said an investigation had been launched, and operations suspended at the kitchen supplying food.

The incident is not an isolated case. There has been a spate of mass poisonings since the programme launched in January.

Last month 365 people fell sick after eating free school meals in Central Java.

Laboratory tests later linked the mass poisoning event to poor sanitation, according to local media.

“The main point is that it’s not just [happening here],” Sigit Pamungkas, leader of the town’s government, told Tempo newspaper at the time. He said the programme as a whole “needs to be more stringent and more hygienic”.

Few dispute that nutrition is an important issue in Indonesia – according to Unicef, the country is grappling with a “triple burden of malnutrition”. In 2023, 21.5 per cent of children were stunted while 4.2 per cent were overweight. Nutrient deficiencies are also significant, with a quarter of pregnant mothers and adolescent girls anaemic.

The programme set out to combat these problems by providing healthy, free meals in schools across the vast country, which is home to some 285 million people across thousands of islands.

Led by the National Nutrition Agency, the initiative had a budget of 121 trillion rupiah (£5.5bn) in 2025, rising to 225 trillion next year (£10.1bn). This makes it one of the most expensive of its kind – India spends £1.115bn a year to feed 120 million children a year, and Brazil spends roughly the same amount for some 40 million students.

Indonesia has set up centralised kitchens called ‘nutrition services provision centres’, operated by third-party catering services and sometimes military bases. They are supposed to buy local ingredients and turn them into hearty school meals.

But there has been criticism of the approach and rollout.

“We are at the point where we need to tackle nutrition issues… but the mass distribution of meals is not quite the correct answer,” said Ms Saminarsih, adding the universal programme would be better off using resources to focus on targeted help for the most vulnerable.

Jimmy Berlianto, a senior research and policy analyst at the Centre for Indonesian Policy Studies, said that the governance has also been “shaky at best”, leaving the scheme open to abuse.

In March, Indonesia’s anti-graft bureau flagged a “real possibility” of fraud, and there have already been investigations into embezzlement.

“The implementation has been under the spotlight because of the poisoning, recurrent cases of ultra-processed foods, and also the corruption risks – there’s a lack of monitoring and transparency, combined with a massive budget,” Mr Berlianto said.

“This has culminated in the perception the government is irresponsibly spending our tax money, so it’s inseparable from the current uproar.”

For more than a week, demonstrators have been taking to Jakarta’s streets, fuelled by anger over lavish perks for politicians in the world’s third largest democracy.

The trigger was a newly proposed regulation that would give MPs a housing allowance of 50 million rupiahs (£2,230) – which enhanced a sense that those in power were enriching themselves and wasting tax payer money, at a time when youth unemployment has hit 16 per cent and the middle class is shrinking.

The protests turned violent after a young motorbike taxi driver, Affan Kurniawan, was killed when he was run over by a police vehicle. In all, at least 10 people have now died in rallies across the country and over 1,000 have been rushed to hospital, according to the Indonesian Legal Aid Foundation.

In an attempt to quell the anger, Mr Prabowo was forced to announce last weekend that politicians’ substantial perks, including housing and travel allowances, would be reviewed.

But many protesters said the move did not go far enough. As well as economic and governance concerns, they have criticised the expanding role of the military in civilian government under Mr Prabowo, a former general and once son-in-law of Suharto, the deposed dictator.

“There are valid concerns regarding freedom of expression and freedom of assembly,” said Mr Berlianto.

He added: “I think the recent uproar has shown there is a substantial proportion who are discontent with current socio-economic positions… and view the government as fiscally irresponsible. This is also why the nutrition programme is under fire.

“There are concerns about the opportunity cost – not only the poisoning, which is a very real health risk, or because ultra-processed foods counter what it seeks to achieve. But because other education and health programmes will be cut to fund this.”

Mr Berlianto said that it’s not yet clear what specifically has been cut, but called for the expansion of the school meals programme to be paused while stronger food standards and governance systems are put in place.

“Monitoring has been weak, and poisoning incidents are the tip of the iceberg,” he said. “I think at the core of it, the governance solutions in place are not ready yet to establish the programme at this scale.”

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