Motivated by a recent discussion about the role of flat directions, a typical feature of supersymmetric models, in the process of particle production in the early universe a consistent model of inflation and preheating in supergravity with MSSM fields has been built. It is based on a model proposed by M. Kawasaki, M. Yamaguchi and T. Yanagida. In the inflationary stage, the flat directions acquire large vacuum expectation values (VEVs) without spoiling the background of slow-roll, high-scale

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... lation consistent with the latest WMAP5 observational data. In the stage of particle production, naturally following inflation, the role of flat direction large VEVs depends strongly on effects connected with the supergravity framework and non-renormalizable terms in the superpotential, which have been neglected so far in the literature. Such effects turn out to be very important, changing the previous picture of preheating in the presence of large flat direction VEVs by allowing for efficient preheating from the inflaton.