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The prices of eggs in the US have finally begun to fall.
National wholesale prices for eggs, in this case sold under truck loads, fell 15% in the week ended March 7, according to the latest USDA report. It’s been weeks since the last Big Abian FLU outbreak, and it’s been about a month since the media and lawmakers began making more noise about prices.
Now our readers can be allowed to think that moving the price of eggs every week is not so important. They would be wrong to think about this, but we can understand.
Maybe they didn’t see John Byrne Maldock’s work on how global inflation led to an unprecedented global turnover in rulers. Alternatively, they may not be interested in food supply systems or concentrations among US farming companies. Or maybe they like to eat animal products without thinking too much about where they came from.
But from a purely macro perspective, today’s consumer price index data provides this ridiculous chart.
The average cost of a dozen eggs increased by 12.5% per month in February. (It’s still seasonally adjusted at 10.4%.) This is an annual increase of 59%. Again, it’s ridiculous and gives a lot of attention to the market.
Anti-trust lawyer Basel Mshalbash claims in a compelling detailed series that the industry’s concentration (at every level of the market) has removed competitive reasons for restructuring flocks soon after the outbreak of avian flu.
Another commentator argues that eggs should be expensive in the Atlantic. (??) But another argument in the work – the fact that cheap eggs require chicken “irradiation” hides a very reasonable point. Factory farms are the cheapest egg-wrenching ones. And chickens are more vulnerable to avian flu outbreaks, as they are fairly close to one-quarter crowded in traditional cages.
This is not entirely stated in USDA’s latest market figures regarding the avian flu outbreak, but the numbers imply that.
The 30.3 million birds lost included 22.4 million (74%) in traditional cages, 7.9 million (26%) in cage-free systems, and 26,000 organics (0.1%). These losses represent 12.3% of traditional cage group, 7.8% of non-organic cage-free herds, and 0.1% of organic group on January 1, 2025. Compared to January 1, the cage-free group increased by 1.2% and the organic group increased by 0.6%. As of the end of February, caged systems had almost three-quarters of layer loss.
Therefore, it is worth noting another announcement that precedes the decline in egg prices. The US government has spent $400 million to compensate producers who have to compensate producers who have to be undercontrolled to control further spread of the flu and “help farmers accelerate the rate of recleaning, including ways to speed up the approval process.” Meanwhile, the US is cutting grants for cancer research.
