Beyond nutrition: Assessing Indonesia’s Free Nutritious Meals Programme, education funding commitments, and public policy trade-offs

Indonesia’s Free Nutritious Meals programme or Makan Bergizi Gratis (MBG), launched in January 2025, is one of the fastest-growing school feeding initiatives in the world. It has also become, arguably, the most consequential education finance decision of the Prabowo administration: in 2026, Rp223.6 trillion of its allocation, 29.1% of the constitutionally mandated education budget, was booked as education spending, leaving about 14% of state spending for education proper. Combining critical policy analysis with a synthesis of international evidence and an examination of budget documents, court records and news reports up to September 2026, this conceptual paper argues that MBG, as designed and financed, produces educational displacement in five registers: constitutional (compliance through reclassification), fiscal (opportunity costs for learning), pedagogical (schools repurposed as logistics nodes), safety (expansion outrunning regulatory capacity, with more than 50,000 reported poisoning cases) and democratic (centralised, patronage-prone and partly militarised delivery). Comparative experience, from Brazil’s legally ring-fenced and locally procured programme and Japan’s curricular integration of school food to Ghana’s politicised catering, shows that school meals improve enrolment, nutrition and, modestly, learning when they complement rather than substitute for core educational investment. We propose an Education-Coherent School Meals (ECSM) framework comprising five conditions (fiscal additionality, pedagogical integration, safety before scale, accountable civilian governance, and evidence-led, equity-sequenced expansion) and derive testable propositions. The Constitutional Court’s July 2026 ruling that MBG must be separated from the education budget by 2028 addresses only the first of these conditions.