During the US presidential campaign last year, nothing captured Americans’ dissatisfaction with inflation as succinctly as the price of eggs. As a candidate, US President Donald Trump repeatedly said that “When I win, I will bring prices down on Day 1.”
Of course, that has not happened. Instead, eggs cost more than ever. Denny’s and Waffle House are adding egg surcharges to their menus and many grocery store shelves are empty.
Avian flu has hit US egg producers hard. Farmers have been forced to kill off more than 150 million of their egg-laying hens, limiting supply and sending prices soaring.
The blame for an outbreak that started in 2022 cannot be laid fully at the feet of an administration barely in its sixth week. However, it is Trump’s problem now. So far, he has only made matters worse.
The US historically had the strongest avian flu surveillance program in the world, through the US Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service. It is one that farmers in Iowa, Ohio, Indiana and Pennsylvania — which together produce almost half of the eggs in the country — have relied on to guide them through this outbreak.
Last week, the department acknowledged that the mass firings included an unconfirmed number of people working on the bird flu response — a stunning display of bureaucratic incompetence. Officials are now scrambling to find and rehire them.
Meanwhile, egg prices keep going up; they are up 53 percent compared to a year ago and 15 percent since January. The average price of a dozen eggs reached a new high of US$4.95 in last month. The cost is far more in some places — in Wisconsin, for example, a carton of pasture-raised eggs can set consumers back US$10. Some grocery stores have imposed limits on how many cartons customers could buy.
The toll on farmers has been staggering. They must pay not only the cost of culling their flocks, but replacing them with healthy stock. They bear the cost of disposal of dead hens and for the enhanced biosecurity measures recommended by the USDA. They face growing losses and even greater uncertainty about the future.
The magnitude of the egg shortage is even complicating matters at the US-Mexico border, which Trump has made a point of trying to secure. US Customs and Border Protection agents are finding evidence of a rising black market in eggs. Confiscation of eggs at ports of entry has increased 29 percent compared with the same time last year.
None of this appears to represent a political problem for Trump — yet. Only 32 percent of Americans approve of Trump’s handling of high prices, according to a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll. There would be political hell to pay if the bird flu mutates to become a human outbreak, something almost half of Americans are already worried about. So far there have been 70 cases of humans contracting the virus from farm animals, along with one death. To date there have been no cases of human-to-human transmission in the US.
What is to be done? The longstanding US strategy of euthanizing millions of birds has failed to contain the spread. New solutions are necessary — but they would not be easy to sell to farmers.
Trump, who favors quick, bold, short-term solutions, has reached out to Turkey (one of the few countries with whom he still has good relations) and arranged to buy 15,000 tonnes of eggs. That might ease egg prices temporarily, but US farmers, who are watching their flocks and their profits decline, would not be too happy.
Farmers might not be enthusiastic about the longer-term solution either: vaccinations. Vaccinating flocks would add expense and complexity, but immunization might be necessary. The USDA has given conditional approval to a new bird flu vaccine developed by Zoetis, the world’s largest producer of livestock medications. Other countries, including China, Mexico, France, Vietnam and others already routinely vaccinate domestic flocks against the virus.
Other options, like changing how eggs are farmed, would also be unpopular with many large-scale farming operations. Jason Amundsen at Locally Laid in Wrenshall, Minnesota, expressed a view common among smaller-scale operations.
“We subscribe to the idea that when you put 30,000 birds in a barn that’s part of a complex of 3 million, you’re asking for pathogens,” he said. “The birds’ immune systems don’t have a chance.”
Most US eggs come from such mega-farms, and changing how eggs are produced is likely to meet industry resistance.
However difficult the solutions, none could proceed until the Trump administration invests more in the USDA’s avian flu work. It is too important to derail or curtail.
Accidentally firing bird flu specialists in the midst of an avian influenza pandemic is just one of many instances that prove why — unlike with Silicon Valley start-ups — “move fast and break things,” is unworkable when it comes to the federal government. The stakes of failure or guessing wrong are just too high.
Patricia Lopez is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering politics and policy. She is a former member of the editorial board at the Minneapolis Star Tribune, where she also worked as a senior political editor and reporter. This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
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