More than 1,700 students and teachers in Indonesia have fallen ill with food poisoning in the space of a week after eating government-supplied free meals, officials said on Thursday, in the latest blow to President Prabowo Subianto’s flagship nutrition programme, reports Reuters.
A further 777 people were sickened in Central Java alone this week, a school principal said, while a member of a parliamentary health commission said separate outbreaks in three other locations had affected another 950 people, taking the week’s cumulative total past 1,700.
Prabowo launched the multibillion-dollar free meals scheme last year with the aim of improving nutrition for tens of millions of children nationwide. But the costly initiative has been repeatedly hit by allegations of corruption, changes in its leadership, and a series of mass food poisoning outbreaks.
At a senior high school in Lasem, Central Java, 752 students and 25 teachers developed diarrhoea and vomiting after eating free meals on Wednesday, according to the school’s principal, Juhartutik, who uses one name.
The students had been served grilled chicken, and a food taster had flagged some portions as “slimy” before distribution, she said, adding that the flagged portions were set aside.
The kitchen operator told her the food had been cooked at 3am and eaten at noon. Most of the affected students were sent home, while a local doctor, Joko Paryanto, said 15 students and teachers required hospital treatment.
The Lasem outbreak followed a separate incident on Tuesday in Sidoarjo, East Java, where 664 students fell ill, according to local official Herawati Yuwantina. Two further outbreaks were recorded on Wednesday — 49 cases in the East Java city of Nganjuk and 237 in the Agam region of West Sumatra — according to lawmaker Charles Honoris, citing local health department data. Honoris, a member of the sole party outside Indonesia’s governing coalition, said on Instagram that the incidents were not isolated. “This is a failure of the system,” he wrote.
Honoris said health department figures showed 50,000 people had been affected by food poisoning linked to the programme as of September 1.
The National Nutrition Agency, which administers the 12.94-billion-dollar scheme, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the latest cases. It suspended the kitchen linked to the Sidoarjo outbreak on Wednesday.
Officials and health workers say improper food storage and delays between cooking and serving meals are frequently to blame for such outbreaks, as in the Lasem case where several hours elapsed between preparation and consumption.
Public confidence in the programme has already been shaken. A survey conducted in July by pollster Saiful Mujani Research and Consulting found that only around a third of respondents were satisfied with the scheme, with repeated poisoning incidents cited as a major factor behind the low approval ratings.
The free meals initiative remains one of the signature policies of Prabowo’s administration, intended to tackle child malnutrition and stunting across the vast archipelago nation.
But its expanding list of setbacks — from budget pressures to management changes and now a mounting toll of sickened students — has fuelled growing scrutiny of how the programme is run, with critics arguing that oversight of food preparation and delivery has failed to keep pace with its scale.
