Feeding the Nation: The Indo-Pacific Politics of Care

Mirielle Augustin | Indo Pacific Fellow

Image sourced from Rahmat, Public Relations of the Cabinet Secretariat of the Republic of Indonesia via Wikimedia Commons.

Indonesia’s President Prabowo’s flagship free-meal program was meant to nourish millions of schoolchildren, toddlers and pregnant women. Instead, thousands were hospitalised after eating contaminated food. This failed policy exemplifies a regional pattern: across the Indo-Pacific, the language of care has become a political currency. Leaders such as the Philippines’ President Ferdinand Marcos Jr and Cambodia’s Hun Met promise to ‘feed the nation’ or lift living standards, pledges which often serve to project benevolence rather than deliver structural change.

Together, these cases illustrate how welfare is increasingly deployed as a visible performance of leadership rather than a sustained investment in social protection. These schemes emerge in contexts of rising inequality, post-pandemic economic fragility, and weakening public trust, where promises of food or financial relief offer quick reassurance while structural problems remain unaddressed.

MBG and Prabowo’s Politics of Provision

In Indonesia, this turn toward visible, moralised welfare manifestedin the Free Nutritious Meal (MBG) program, one of the eight major initiatives from Prabowo’s election manifesto. Framed as a landmark effort to tackle child malnutrition and stunting through universal daily school meals, MBG was ambitious in scope. From the outset, however, observers raised concerns about the program’s scale, lack of preparation and absence of clear nutritional or logistical grounding.  

Those concerns have since proven well-founded. By late October, over 15,000 children had reportedly fallen ill after consuming MBG meals. Despite this, Prabowo has continued to defend the program, arguing that “only 0.0017 percent” of more than a billion meals had caused illness, and crediting the MBG with improving school attendance and achievement.

The policy is not just a case of mismanagement. Even a well-planned program would have faced significant logistical barriers to nationwide implementation. Yet economically, MBG does not stimulate domestic industry, create sustainable employment, or address the underlying causes of poverty and malnutrition. Thus, MBG functions to feed political egos and patronage politics rather than children. This paternal framing reflects a deeper political culture of provision rooted in militarised governance, one that equates control and compassion, and replaces the responsibility to reform with the capacity to distribute.

As social policy is used as a platform to project moral authority while dodging institutional reform, programs like MBG reveal how welfare is increasingly mobilised to shore up legitimacy rather than to drive institutional reform, a pattern that extends across the Indo-Pacific.

Regional Parallels: Theatre of Welfare

In the Philippines, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr’s rice subsidy programs echo sentiments of political performance poorly disguised as welfare. His ₱20 rice initiative was introduced in 2024 as a pilot subsidy to make rice affordable for low-income households. Its rollout and associated import policies have been incoherent and inconsistent, reflecting a desire for quick visibility. Moreover, decades of structural underinvestment in irrigation and domestic production mean that no subsidy can succeed without long-term agricultural reform.

Cambodia under Hun Manet reflects similar tendencies. While less formalised, the continuation of targeted welfare schemes has maintained his father’s model of distributive politics, where assistance flows through networks of party loyalty rather than through transparent, broad-based systems of protection. In a state where institutions remain subordinate to ruling-party structures, targeted assistance offers a controlled and visible substitute for universal reform, allowing leaders to project responsiveness while preserving existing power arrangements.

Conversely, India’s Mid-Day Meal Scheme combines state funding with partnerships from non-profits like Akshaya Patra, distributing meals to over 100 million students through a decentralised system that prioritises oversight, fiscal discipline, and community involvement. With production efficiency and self-sufficiency in food grains, India has built the administrative and agricultural infrastructure necessary to sustain such a program at scale. India’s relative success demonstrates how welfare can function as a durable public institution. By embedding care in governance structures through decentralisation, sustained agricultural investment, and long-standing civil society involvement, welfare shifts from symbolic provision to a substantive public good.

Across the Indo Pacific, populations are fed empty promises of welfare while leaders feed increasingly centralised regimes. The above regional analysis exposes a shared political insinct among leaders to exploit care into visibility.  This pattern is fuelled by overlapping pressures of rising inequality, post-pandemic fiscal strain, and electorates fatigued with slow growth and corruption, which limit the capacity of governments to deliver meaningful structural reform and produce a cycle where visibility triumphs over substance.

Care and Control in the Indo Pacific

Leaders are struggling with the same dilemma: how to sustain legitimacy in an era of inequality, fatigue, and fragmented trust. In this context, welfare, especially in moralised forms, has emerged as one of the few remaining currencies of credibility.

Social schemes serve as reassurance that the state still provides, even when its capacity to govern is eroding. This logic mirrors global trends: from pandemic relief packages in advanced economies to cash-transfer populism in emerging democracies, public assistance has been re-cast as proof of leadership rather than as a social right.

Still, such behaviour is not going unnoticed or unchallenged. In Indonesia and the Philippines, protests over food safety, labour rights, and cost-of-living pressures highlight public government scepticism and a growing awareness of persistent structural inequality. Citizens are not satisfied and they are demanding better.

These schemes reveal that care cannot be sustained through spectacle. Programs like MBG or the ₱20 rice initiative were not doomed because welfare is impossible, but because institution-building was secondary to political display. India’s success suggests that when welfare is treated as a public right, supported by decentralisation, oversight, and agricultural capacity, it can transform social outcomes rather than merely signal intent.

Mirielle Augustin is the Indo Pacific Fellow for Young Australians in International Affairs. She is completing a Bachelor of Philosophy (Honours)-Humanities and Social Sciences and a Diploma of Languages at the Australian National University. Of East Timorese and Malaysian heritage, she grew up across France, Mauritania, Cameroon, Timor-Leste and Australia, which has shaped her passion for public policy, cultural diplomacy, and multilingual engagement.

Mirielle has studied and worked abroad in France and Indonesia, including programs supported by DFAT’s New Colombo Plan, and the Australia-Indonesia Youth Exchange Program in 2024. Through this Fellowship, she hopes to explore how international affairs can better reflect the lived realities of Indigenous and marginalised communities.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of Young Australians in International Affairs. All content is original, and no plagiarism has been used in the preparation of this article.