Jakarta. Vietnamese and Qatari investors are “very serious” about investing in Indonesia’s cattle breeding as Jakarta seeks to import hundreds of thousands of cows this year, according to Agriculture Minister Andi Amran Sulaiman.

Indonesia plans to import 400,000 live cattle throughout 2025 to support President Prabowo Subianto’s trademark free meal program that is about to enter its one-month mark. About 200,000 of the to-be-imported cows are beef cattle, while the other half are for dairy production. The archipelagic country is hoping to import 2 million live cattle for breeding over the next five years.

The Indonesian government lets foreign companies invest in domestic cattle farming. These investors are expected to import the better-quality live cattle. This way, Indonesia can improve its national meat and milk production -- two key components in Prabowo’s school meal rollout -- without adding burden to the state spending. Andi Amran gave the latest updates to this plan on the sidelines of the 2025 Beritasatu Economic Outlook forum in Jakarta on Thursday. 

“So it is the private sector that is importing live cattle. There are Vietnamese and Qatari companies who are very serious about [this program],” Andi Amran told the press.

He revealed that Vietnamese dairy farming firm TH Group was the investor in question. The minister, however, did not explicitly say who the interested Qatari company is during the doorstep interview. Andi Amran added: “[The 400,000 imported live cattle] would come from several countries. The government wants to facilitate any investment that is coming to Indonesia.”

According to media reports, Andi Amran had previously taken TH Group’s representatives to check out a potential dairy cattle breeding site in Poso, Central Sulawesi, back in September. Andi Amran was Former President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo’s agriculture minister at the time, although he revealed then that TH Group’s investment would primarily go into supporting Prabowo’s free meal program. TH Group plans to ship 250,000 dairy cows into Indonesia to produce 1.8 million tons of milk annually. 

Almost a month has passed since Indonesia rolled out the first tranche of government-aided school meals. Prabowo is banking on this free meal program to improve Indonesians’ nutritional intake, thus eventually developing the country’s human capital. Indonesia is trying to include milk in the distributed meal. For animal protein, the students so far typically get a chicken dish, which is usually more affordable than beef. The government has set a per-meal budget of Rp 10,000 (less than $1).