Fed But Illiterate: Why Indonesia Should Prioritize Free Education Over Food Subsidies

A Policy Critique

In January 2025, the Indonesian government formally launched the Makan Bergizi Gratis (MBG) program a flagship initiative of the Prabowo-Gibran administration providing free nutritious meals to schoolchildren, pregnant women, and early childhood populations. Budgeted at approximately IDR 71 trillion for its first phase, MBG has been positioned as a cornerstone of Indonesia's human development agenda, targeting stunting reduction and improving school attendance (Kemenko PMK, 2025).

The program is not without merit. Indonesia's child stunting rate remains above 21%, and nutritional deficiency continues to correlate strongly with learning outcomes in rural and peri-urban contexts (BPS, 2023). In this regard, MBG addresses a real and urgent problem.

However, this critique argues that while food security is a legitimate concern, the scale of investment in MBG reveals a deeper misalignment in national priorities. Indonesia's most structurally consequential deficit is not caloric it is educational. The decision to feed children who cannot yet read, without a parallel commitment to ensuring they can, reflects a policy logic that prioritizes visible short-term welfare outputs over long-term human capital development.

1. The Literacy Crisis Is More Structural Than the Hunger Crisis

Indonesia's food sovereignty narrative is largely accurate at the macroeconomic level: the country achieved net rice self-sufficiency in multiple recent cycles, and agricultural output has expanded steadily (FAO, 2023). The hunger problem in Indonesia is, in structural terms, a problem of distribution and purchasing power not of production. Children are malnourished not because food does not exist, but because households lack access or income to obtain adequate nutrition.

The educational deficit, by contrast, is structural at its core. According to the 2022 PISA results, Indonesian students ranked 68th out of 81 participating countries in reading comprehension a position that cannot be attributed to purchasing power alone (OECD, 2023). Classroom observation in underperforming regions reveals a more granular crisis: students in Grade 2 who are unable to write five words within a single lesson period; children who reach Grade 3 without functional literacy because automatic promotion policies prevent grade retention regardless of academic readiness.

This is not an isolated anecdote. It is a systemic pattern enabled by a policy architecture that prioritizes social promotion over developmental outcome and MBG, however well-intentioned, does not address it.

2. Free Higher Education Offers Greater Long-Term ROI

The international development literature consistently demonstrates that investment in education particularly tertiary education access produces compounding returns across generations. Germany's tuition-free university model, Nordic countries' fully subsidized higher education systems, and Japan's low-cost public university framework have each contributed to labor forces characterized by high productivity, technological adaptability, and intergenerational mobility (OECD, 2022).

In Indonesia, the cost of higher education remains prohibitive for a significant segment of the population. The Kartu Indonesia Pintar Kuliah (KIP-K) scholarship partially addresses this, but its coverage is insufficient relative to demand, and the pipeline it depends on quality basic and secondary education is itself compromised. Expanding access to free or heavily subsidized S1 education, in parallel with structural reforms to basic education quality, would create a more durable foundation for national human capital than nutritional supplementation alone.

To be precise: the argument here is not that food and education are mutually exclusive. It is that when constrained by fiscal capacity and institutional bandwidth, prioritization matters and the current prioritization reflects a political logic of visibility over structural impact.

3. MBG's Implementation Reveals Institutional Capacity Constraints

Even within its own terms, MBG faces serious implementation challenges. Early reports from the program's rollout phase in 2025 documented uneven distribution networks, logistical bottlenecks in remote regions, and quality control inconsistencies that resulted in spoiled or nutritionally inadequate meals reaching students (Tempo, 2025). These are not merely operational hiccups they reflect a deeper mismatch between the program's ambition and the state's current delivery capacity.

A large-scale nutritional program requires cold chain infrastructure, trained nutritionists, monitoring systems, and local government coordination. Most of these prerequisites are underdeveloped in the regions where MBG is needed most. The same institutional gaps that constrain educational delivery teacher shortages, inadequate school infrastructure, low local government capacity also constrain food program delivery. This suggests that neither problem can be solved by program design alone; both require prior investment in state capacity.

The most substantive counterargument to this critique is a developmental sequencing claim: a hungry child cannot learn. If nutritional deficiency impairs cognitive development and school attendance, then food security is a prerequisite for educational investment, not an alternative to it. This argument is empirically well-supported (Grantham-McGregor et al., 2007) and should not be dismissed.

However, the sequencing argument does not justify the current scale and centrality of MBG within Indonesia's development budget. First, the program's coverage design targeting schoolchildren rather than infants and toddlers in the critical 0–5 window when nutritional intervention has the highest neurological impact raises questions about whether MBG is optimally designed even for its stated developmental goals (UNICEF, 2019). Second, the argument that hunger must be solved before education can be addressed implicitly accepts a false binary: integrated programs that combine nutrition support with literacy intervention exist and have demonstrated superior outcomes in comparable contexts (World Bank, 2020).

A second counterargument concerns political feasibility: free tertiary education is fiscally expensive and institutionally complex, whereas food programs are easier to communicate to voters and implement through existing infrastructure. This is accurate but does not constitute a normative defense of the policy choice. Political ease is not the same as policy correctness.

The Makan Bergizi Gratis program represents a genuine attempt to address real nutritional deficits in the Indonesian population. This critique does not dispute the existence of the problem it targets. What it disputes is the prioritization logic that places food subsidy at the center of Indonesia's human development agenda while the country's educational infrastructure continues to produce graduates and in many cases, students who cannot graduate without foundational literacy and numeracy competencies.

A child fed but unable to read will reach adulthood with the caloric capacity to work but not the cognitive tools to work well, adapt, or contribute to a knowledge economy. Indonesia's demographic window a young, large population is an asset only if that population is educated. Free education through S1, combined with structural reform of basic education quality standards and an end to automatic promotion policies that mask foundational learning gaps, would represent a more durable investment in national development than any food program operating at the present scale.

Feeding children is necessary. Educating them is transformative. Indonesia's development priorities should reflect that distinction.

References

Badan Pusat Statistik (BPS). (2023). Survei Status Gizi Indonesia 2022. BPS.

Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). (2023). Indonesia country report: Food security and agriculture. FAO.

Grantham-McGregor, S., Cheung, Y. B., Cueto, S., Glewwe, P., Richter, L., & Strupp, B. (2007). Developmental potential in the first 5 years for children in developing countries. The Lancet, 369(9555), 60–70.

Kementerian Koordinator Bidang Pembangunan Manusia dan Kebudayaan (Kemenko PMK). (2025). Panduan implementasi program Makan Bergizi Gratis. Kemenko PMK.

Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). (2022). Education at a glance 2022: OECD indicators. OECD Publishing.

OECD (2023), PISA 2022 Results (Volume I): The State of Learning and Equity in Education, PISA, OECD Publishing, Paris, https://doi.org/10.1787/53f23881-en.

Tempo. (2025, February). Evaluasi awal MBG: Distribusi tidak merata dan masalah kualitas. Tempo.co.

UNICEF. (2019). The first 1,000 days: Nutrition and early childhood development. UNICEF.

World Bank. (2020). Investing in human capital: The World Bank Group's education strategy. World Bank.