Bucharest’s Provisioning during the Months Forerunning the Events of December 1989
Bucharest’s Provisioning during the Months Forerunning the Events of December 1989

Summary/Abstract: The present article aims to describe the general frame and the situation of the capital’s provisioning with agri-food products during the months preceding the events in December 1989; the content was created after searching two archive sources: the National Council for Studying the Archives of the Securitate and the National Archives of Romania. The analysis and the comparison of data emphasize the failure of the concept of planned food provisioning of a city with over 2 million inhabitants. The general frame and the existing context focus on the payment of external doubts, the fake data in the reports of the authorities responsible for the agricultural production and the daily food amounts which were necessary for an efficient provisioning. This wasn’t arranged according to the optimum needs of the population, but following a centralized plan in which food amounts for each person during a year were settled. Even in this way, there were big differences between what should have been and what existed in reality. There were big provisioning problems regarding all food items, especially meat and meat products, eggs, rice, cheese products, oil etc. In general, about 30-45% of the food products couldn’t be provided from various reasons: Ceaușescu’s desire to maintain the food export at a high level, the incapacity of zootechnical complexes to deliver the necessary amounts to the Capital, the lack of organisation and the incompetence at the level of distribution to the food units. The multitude of existing provisioning problems led to huge queues during the year 1989, the price gouging and the black market had reached the highest levels. All these were happening under the circumstances in which the Capital enjoyed a privileged statute, as compared to the rest of the country, being excepted from the existence of ration books along the eighties.

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