Indonesia learns from S. Korea to develop local ingredients for free meals
JAKARTA: Indonesia will learn from South Korea in developing local ingredients for the free nutritious meal programme by considering environmental aspects, National Nutrition Agency (BGN) head Dadan Hindayana said on Wednesday (July 23).
'I know that the Koica [Korea International Cooperation Agency] has long been involved in agriculture for a long time,' Dadan told participants of the National Instrumentation Center for Agromaritime and Bioscience (NICAB) workshop at the IPB International Convention Center (IICC).
'I believe this is the right time because when the free meals programme was developed, 95 per cent of ingredients being used were agricultural produce.'
The workshop was jointly organised by the Koica and Bogor Agricultural University (IPB) from Wednesday to Friday.
Participants came from the Higher Education, Science and Technology Ministry, the National Research and Innovation Agency and the National Development Planning Board, as well as academicians and leaders from Indonesia's top universities.
Dadan said that Korea used local ingredients for its free meal program, something that can be adopted here.
'In the future, we will also do something like that, because our need will be big. We are already on the right track, similar to what South Korea and Japan developed, we will emphasise the use of local ingredients,' he said.
'Every SPPG [nutrition fulfilment service unit] and nutritionists will craft a menu based on the potential of local resources and also the preference of the local people.'
He added that once the programme was up and running, food resilience in every village and district will increase, so there will be no food deficiency at the national level.
"We are learning from South Korea that as the programme progresses, the use of local ingredients will be intensified,' he said.
Meanwhile, project comanager for the KOICA-IPB-Seoul National University Center for Agriculture and Bioscience, Rinekso Soekmadi, said that the NICAB workshop was a cooperation initiative between IPB and South Korea.
'This workshop is in its third year, and we focus on food because it is aligned with national program,' he said.
'We hope there will further cooperation between Indonesia and South Korea, especially to make the nutritious meal programme a success.'
Dadan said the South Korean side explained that their free meal programme covered 1,300 schools and needed nine years to develop with a population of just 51 million.
'We just started six months ago and have reached seven million beneficiaries with 2,259 SPPGs. We hope to reach 82.9 million recipients by year-end,' he said.
With 3,000 students, each unit will require 200 kilograms of uncooked rice every day. For protein, it requires 3,000 eggs or 350 1-kg chickens. Also needed are 350 kg of vegetables, which cannot be supplied by a single farmer and must be coordinated by village-owned enterprises and cooperatives, and 350 kg of fruit.
He said that vendors selling locally grown bananas in Sentul were happy that SPPGs buy their fruit in large quantities every day.
'We also need 490 liters of milk. If a dairy cow produces 10 litres of milk per day, each SPPG needs 50 cows. If there are 10 SPPGs in a district, the district needs 500 cows,' he said.
Dadan said every SPPG has a budget of Rp 10 billion (US$612,100) per year, with 85 per cent of the budget used to buy ingredients, of which 90 percent are agricultural products. - The Jakarta Post/ANN
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