New safety rules did not stop the free meals from making students sick

Indonesia's National Nutrition Agency, BGN, issued new safety rules for the free school meals programme at the end of August. Then came September. In the first three days of the month, 1,961 students fell ill after eating the meals, in schools across Java, Sumatra and Sulawesi. The biggest single case was at Manbaul Hikam, an Islamic boarding school in Sidoarjo, East Java, where 730 students were affected on 2 September. The South China Morning Post reports that the agency's head, Sudaryono, blamed that outbreak on "deliberate negligence."

That phrase decides who gets punished. It points at one kitchen and its staff, not at a system that feeds tens of millions of children through thousands of contracted kitchens on a fixed daily budget. Neither the agency nor the report explains which part of the new rules failed in Sidoarjo, so the rules stay on paper and the cause stays personal.

The scale is what makes the pattern hard to dismiss. By the end of August, at least 43,000 children had been made ill since the programme started in January 2025. Spread evenly across those months, that is a bit over 2,000 a month. The first three days of September nearly matched a whole month's average on their own. The programme costs about 15.2 billion US dollars, which is real money set against schools, clinics and roads, and it is being spent on a service that keeps sending children home sick.

Why it matters

The rules now exist, which gives parents and school committees something specific to ask about: which kitchen supplies your school, and has anyone checked it since late August. That question is more useful than complaining after an outbreak, because under the agency's own framing the punishment lands on a kitchen operator and the programme carries on unchanged. Watch whether the next outbreak produces an inspection or just another word like negligence, since that is the difference between a fix and a scapegoat.