ABSTRACT
Food is a daily need of everyone. For that reason, societies need institutions that can provide enough food to meet this basic need. In a command economy, the Party was in charge of the production and allocation of food and, as Trotsky emphasized, food was a political weapon that could be used make people keep to the party line. However, since the agricultural policies of a command economy often made the supply of food problematic, this weapon could be a boomerang. If the command economy could not produce sufficient food for everyone, then it risked rationing and even food riots, or the need to import food from capitalist countries.
