Egg costs are rising once more. The wrongdoer, once more: chicken flu.
At the very least, that’s the surface-level cause. Within the present wave, in line with the CDC, the H5N1 chicken flu has been present in over 90 million poultry birds throughout virtually each state since 2022, and has even unfold to dairy cattle, with over 30 herds in 9 states coping with an outbreak on the time of this writing.
The final time chicken flu struck US farms, in early 2022, egg costs greater than doubled through the yr, reaching a peak of $4.82 for a dozen in January 2023. Throughout the chicken flu outbreak in 2014 to 2015, egg costs additionally briefly soared.
Whereas costs now are nonetheless nowhere close to the height they reached in January 2023, they’ve been creeping up once more since final August, when a dozen giant eggs value $2.04. As of March, we’re bumping up in opposition to the $3 mark, which is a virtually 47 p.c improve. It’s additionally an enormous improve from the worth we had been used to some years in the past: In early 2020, a dozen eggs had been simply $1.46 on common.
The H5N1 pressure of chicken flu is extremely contagious and clearly poses a giant danger to hens. However the truth that chicken flu outbreaks maintain battering our meals system factors to a deeper drawback: an agriculture trade that has change into brittle because of intense market focus.
The egg market is dominated by some main gamers
The egg trade, like a lot of the agricultural sector, is commanded by a couple of heavyweights — the most important, Cal-Maine Meals, controls 20 p.c of the market — that depart little slack within the system to soak up and isolate shocks like illness.
Lots of of 1000’s of animals are packed tightly collectively on a single farm, as my colleague Marina Bolotnikova has defined, the place illness can unfold like wildfire. In response to the federal government and company accountability group Meals & Water Watch, three-quarters of the nation’s a whole bunch of thousands and thousands of egg-laying hens are crammed into simply 347 manufacturing facility farms.
The system additionally makes use of genetically related animals that farms consider will maximize egg manufacturing — however that lack of genetic variety means animal populations are much less proof against illness.
When a hen will get contaminated, stopping the unfold is an ugly, merciless enterprise; since 2022 it has led to the killing of 85 million poultry birds. For the patron, it usually means paying much more than ordinary for a carton of eggs.
Stopping any outbreaks of illness from ever occurring isn’t lifelike, however the mannequin of recent industrial farming is making outbreaks extra disruptive.
And it’s not simply these disruptions driving worth spikes. Egg producers additionally seem like making the most of these moments and mountain climbing costs past what they’d want to take care of their outdated revenue margins.
“It’s completely a narrative of company profiteering,” says Rebecca Wolf, senior meals coverage analyst at Meals & Water Watch.
Cal-Maine’s internet revenue in 2023 was about $758 million — 471 p.c larger than the yr prior, in line with its annual monetary report. Most of this fortune was made via hoisting up costs; the variety of eggs offered, measured in dozens, rose solely 5.9 p.c.
Final yr, a number of meals conglomerates, together with Kraft and Common Mills, had been awarded virtually $18 million in damages in a lawsuit alleging that egg producers Cal-Maine and Rose Acre Farms had constrained the availability of eggs within the mid- to late 2000s, artificially bumping costs. A farmer advocacy group final yr known as on the FTC to look into whether or not high egg producers had been worth gouging shoppers.
Are we doomed to semi-regular worth surges for eggs?
Our meals system didn’t change into so consolidated — and fragile — accidentally. We obtained right here due to three large causes, Wolf says: by not imposing environmental legal guidelines, by not imposing antitrust legal guidelines, and by giving freely “tons of cash” to the agriculture trade.
Throughout the New Deal period, the federal authorities put in place insurance policies that might assist handle meals provide and defend each farmers and shoppers from sharp deviations in what the previous earned and the latter paid. Beneath Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz within the Nineteen Seventies, although, these insurance policies began getting chipped away; Butz’s well-known motto was for farmers to “get large or get out.” The unfold of big manufacturing facility farms is partly a product of this about-face in managing provide.
As a result of our meals system is so concentrated and intermingled, it additionally means any single provide chain hiccup — whether or not as a consequence of illness, wars, or every other cause — can have ripple results on others, affecting costs in an unlimited variety of important shopper items and providers. “When we’ve issues like E. coli outbreaks, it’s laborious to know the place the issue lies as a result of the best way that we course of and manufacture is so hyper-industrialized that you just then have an issue with thousands and thousands of kilos of meals,” says Wolf.
Fortunately, the Biden administration has been making some strides in loosening up meals trade consolidation, usually by shoring up enforcement of long-existing antitrust legal guidelines. However there’s nonetheless extra we may do. There are payments which have been launched to Congress, like Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s Value Gouging Prevention Act, that might give the FTC the authority to first outline what counts as worth gouging after which crack down on firms that elevate costs excessively.
The cycle of meals chain snags and better costs doesn’t should maintain repeating.
“We’re maximizing revenue really over all the things else — over the welfare of the animals, over the rights and wages of people that work within the meals system, for even shoppers who’re on the grocery retailer,” Wolf says. “None of that is inevitable — we shouldn’t should be right here.”
This story appeared initially in At present, Defined, Vox’s flagship day by day publication. Enroll right here for future editions.
