ALSA 2025 meeting

Abstract:

The project is called 'free nutritious meal' (MBG). This is a 'right populist wing' program, launched by Prabowo’s administration after winning electoral politics in Indonesia, 2024. Through a number of Presidential policies, this project has changed much the legal system that have tremendous impacts on budget policies, especially in the public service sectors, education, health, taxation, and many other budget cuts in the name of efficiency.

The fundamental issue in this project is how the government has enacted laws and its operational policies by orchestrating ‘progressive realization’ narratives, in the field of right to food. The narrative and underpinned laws are questionable due to little correlation to the fulfilment of the state’s responsibility in implementing right to food. On the contrary, this MBG political project actually spends funds on trillions of funds related to ‘food estates’ as part of ‘securitization’, which accelerate deforestation rate and damage natural resources excessively. Even, based on ‘food security’ program, Ministry of Defence has deployed military troops in securing such MBG’s projects. Hence, MBG has been enabling the acceleration of military business, ‘state captured corruption, as well as systematic human rights violation, including the restriction and even silencing criticism on MBG projects.

This article provides arguments on first, how the MBG’s right to food project has been easily manipulated through legal politics and its digital propagandas, in order to underpin military interference into business, and second, how a human rights project in a country can actually accelerate to systematic crimes of violating economic, social and cultural rights, through normalising abuse carried out by militarised governance as well as 'state captured corruption'.