Importing Eggs Won’t Lower Prices, Experts Say

Egg prices have never been this high. To address this, newly appointed United States Department of Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins recently outlined a five-pronged plan to address high egg prices for American consumers: including potentially importing eggs. Importing eggs is not the norm in the United States, especially considering this country is the second-largest egg exporter in the world. We produce over 100 billion eggs per year, millions of which go to Canada and Mexico.

The U.S. plans to import 420 million eggs from Turkey — barely a drop in the 100 billion-eggs-annually bucket. Even if the U.S. imported one billion eggs, that would only lower prices by a small percentage, Associate Dean of the School of Public Policy at UC Riverside Bruce Babcock tells Sentient. If the U.S. wanted to lower prices by, say, 10 percent, it would need to import close to 2 billion eggs, he says. And by the time that happens, more chickens will likely have been culled — meaning the “lower” price may still be much higher for consumers than pre-avian flu levels.

In order to keep up with avian flu, which is still spreading, the U.S. would need to import billions, not millions of eggs. Other countries also might not want their own domestic egg supplies to diminish, which could in turn raise their prices.

“Whether or not we can actually import that many eggs to have that kind of price effect is probably not possible, because other countries don’t have that many surplus eggs, and if they did try to export that many eggs to the United States, their egg prices would rise dramatically,” Babbock says. “It’s not clear that it’s feasible, but is it theoretically possible? Yes.”

Importing Eggs: a Fragile Plan

Eggs are incredibly fragile and need to be refrigerated, making them an expensive commodity to trade, explains James Mitchell, Assistant Professor and Extension Livestock Economist at the University of Arkansas. “Think about how careful you have to be transporting eggs from the grocery store to your house,” Mitchell tells Sentient.

As avian influenza continues to spread, each day resulting in the death of thousands of chickens (killed by culling), the U.S. government is scrambling to get a hold of how to keep costs low for consumers. Thus far, they have not been successful, and importing eggs seems like one of the least economically viable options considering the scale of the problem.

Factory Farms Have Boosted Cheap Egg Supply, But at a Cost to Public Health

Over 99 percent of farmed animals are raised in concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs), where they often do not have room to move around or see daylight. According to a new report by Food & Water Watch, the system is incredibly consolidated: 75 percent of egg-laying eggs in the U.S. are raised on fewer than 350 factory farms, and the vast majority — 99 percent — of commercial laying hens impacted by bird flu lived on factory farms.

The efficiency of factory farms and increasing consolidation in agriculture has historically enabled eggs to be an extremely cheap commodity at the grocery store. Feed costs are low, and factory farms are highly efficient, churning out millions of eggs per month. But the true cost of these operations can be seen in their externalities: a lack of animal welfare, pollution and compromised worker safety.

“With regards to animal welfare, we’re probably the worst country in the world with our battery cages,” Babcock says. “Any country that crams those laying hens into little battery cages…It’s just inhumane, in my opinion, but that’s my opinion, because I care about animal welfare.”

CAFOs are notorious breeding grounds for highly pathogenic diseases. Animals often defecate on top of one another and ventilation is scarce.

“When disease hits a production facility, and they have to destroy all the chickens that are laying hens, there’s so many in one location that it disrupts the supply of eggs nationally to a much greater extent than if you had smaller production units spread out across the countryside,” Babcock says. “Consolidation increases the risk to our food security. It doesn’t decrease the risk.”

When one chicken tests positive for avian influenza, the entire flock needs to be killed, though new secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is interested in trying out “therapeutic drugs” on flocks to avoid culling.

Uncertainty About the Trump Administration’s Avian Flu Plan

Advocates from across the aisle are calling for the federal government to intervene. Rollins responded with her plan to put $1 billion toward avian flu research. But with sweeping federal government cuts from the Department of Agriculture to the Food and Drug Administration, including within the avian flu research team, it is unclear how much will actually get done.

“The actions of the Trump administration to unilaterally disable key roles of government runs completely counter to the proper role of government in providing food security and food safety,” Babcock says. “It’s almost as if the Trump administration…[is] trying to actually disable the government functions in those areas, and one of them is in food safety.”

Additionally, relying on imported eggs also relies on the notion that avian flu will not spread to, or highly affect, the countries the U.S. imports from. So far, avian flu has been detected in 108 countries.

“We don’t have a crystal ball, so we don’t know how this could look like for those other countries in a month, two months, two months, six months, a year from now,” Mitchell says.

Both Mitchell and Babcock agree that the solution rests in collective action to restructure the industry. Mitchell says more research on vaccines and biosecurity are needed, and that the problem extends far beyond factory farms to migratory flocks, too, ushering a need for more cross-departmental collaboration.

“The public good is the ability for producers to produce in a disease-free environment,” Babcock says. “Private industry does not provide public goods at the right level.”