High Egg Prices Are a Choice

Eggs cost $9.70 in San Diego, but a few dollars across the border in Mexico. The price difference is so compelling that people have taken to smuggling eggs and even live chickens across the border. Egg prices in Southern California are so high that there are signs that drug cartels and gangs are starting to smuggle eggs along with their usual cargoes of drugs.

Eggs cost around $6 in Chicago, but around $4 US across the border in Canada. In the past half year, 3,768 ‘poultry and bird’ products were intercepted at the Canadian border. Reportedly more eggs than fentanyl are being seized by customs coming down to America.

Why are eggs cheaper in Canada and Mexico than in America?

One reason is that Mexico and Canada have culled chickens on a smaller scale than we have. Mexico began vaccinating its chickens in the 90s and doesn’t cull chickens unless the outbreak is severe, while the Biden administration wiped out huge numbers of chickens with little pretext.

“The Biden administration and the Department of Agriculture directed the mass killing of more than 100 million chickens, which has led to a lack of chicken supply in this country, therefore lack of egg supply, which is leading to the shortage,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said back in January.

The actual number is now over 150 million when including ducks, turkeys and other birds.

The mass cullings haven’t stopped the spread of bird flu. Ever since the Biden administration launched that policy in 2022, the virus is now present in every state and the cullings actually helped infect human workers who handled the disposal of millions of dead chickens.

Bird flu is primarily spread by migrating wildfowl, but environmentalists refuse to allow the mass killing of wild birds, and prefer the idea of wiping out farms instead. Mass culling, while devastating to farms, still looks more profitable because farmers receive compensation for culled birds, but not ones that die of natural causes, making culling seem like a safer bet.

The government has paid out over $1 billion to compensate for culled birds. And the vast majority of the birds in question may not have needed to be culled in the first place.

While bird flu is devastating smaller farmers, a tight circle of major egg producers has taken home over $250 million in culling payments, while consolidating the market and raising egg prices. The Justice Department is now investigating some of these companies for price-fixing. Some of these companies previously faced similar accusations. But the real issues with the effect of market consolidation on prices goes beyond just price fixing.

Factory farms operate on a scale that makes mass culling of chickens more necessary. That’s another reason why Canada and Mexico, whose egg production comes from smaller scale farms, have fared better during the bird flu. There’s a big difference between a farm with thousands of hens and a mass industry, one of whose biggest players had to cull over 500,000 chickens in one single outbreak, out of its total of 32 million hens.

And equally significantly, broiler exports are more significant than domestic egg sales, and that requires that chickens not be vaccinated. The opposition to vaccinating chickens has nothing to do with the preference of some American consumers for avoiding vaccines, and everything to do with an export market that treats vaccinated chickens as evidence of bird flu infestation.

However since America is already infested with bird flu, this puts the chicken ahead of the egg.

American agriculture no longer exists to benefit either American farmers or consumers. Much of it is owned by foreign companies or investors who use it as a worldwide resource. The cost of eggs to Americans becomes a minor matter hardly worth bothering with in a global market.

The mass culling of chickens helps reassure export markets that our chickens are safe for foreign countries and that matters far more than whether Americans can afford to buy eggs.

And so the cullings are likely to continue, not for the sake of Americans, but the export market.

Environmentalist and organic opponents of factory farms however are just as culpable. The same year as the outbreak of bird flu began, California passed the Farm Animal Confinement Initiative requiring “cage free eggs”. Egg prices in the state began to rise and are still some of the highest in the country. Cage free eggs did not ‘make life better’ for barnyard animals. The same companies already selling eggs put on a show of being ‘cage-free’ while raising prices.

That’s why egg prices are $4 higher on average in California than in Texas.

Meanwhile few in the U.S. are willing to look for answers beyond the mass culling of chickens.

Canada’s commitment to culling at all costs reached a turning point at an ostrich farm earlier this year. When bird flu was detected at the Kootenay ostrich farm in British Columbia, the owner resisted the order to cull the ostriches, protesters gathered and the birds rallied. Oly 10% died while the rest recovered. A court order has spared those ostriches from being exterminated.

The ostrich farm was isolated and ostriches don’t fly. But farm fowls also don’t. The spreaders of infection are migratory birds like Canada geese which were already local pests, but are protected by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act that took hold shortly after a previous major flu outbreak over a century ago. In his last days in office, Trump watered down the ancient treaty, but those changes were quickly reverted by the fanatically environmentalist Biden administration. And yet the only kind of culling that can stop bird flu would be culling wild birds.

Cities and states have culled geese and other migratory pests before on the grounds that they’re a massive nuisance, and culling geese and other fowl that fly around concentrations of farms is far more likely to work than killing millions more non-migratory domestic fowl.

Our response to the bird flu, like the response to the COVID pandemic, is based on the irrational pursuit of a ‘safetyism’ that is impossible to achieve in the real world and which has severe economic and social side effects. If bird flu becomes a major outbreak among humans, it won’t be because we didn’t kill enough chickens, but because of events in China or elsewhere.

Panicking over the bird flu hasn’t worked. The sensible thing to do would be to pursue herd immunity among domestic fowl, the way it already exists among wildfowl, stop mass cullings on the scale of the Biden administration, and accept that it is now endemic in the United States. And focus more on culling migratory fowl that spread the disease over domestic chickens.

American agriculture is both too regulated and too centralized, aimed at export markets instead of domestic ones, and subject to the vicissitudes of government bureaucrats and foreigners.

Last week, I visited a major supermarket and had to choose between the last two remaining cartons of eggs, both had one egg already broken inside, and both were priced at $10 or more.

High egg prices are a choice and we’ve made all the wrong ones.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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