Democrats smell an egg scam in the US as prices soar, demand probe

On her first day on the job, the new US Department of Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins convened a meeting to discuss the agency’s options for managing the bird flu epidemic and perhaps lowering egg prices.

Rollins also visited with two dozen farmers last week to discuss their suggestions on how to combat avian flu, offering them relief.

“This problem wasn’t created overnight, and it will take us a little time to tackle this issue, but we will take aggressive action to help our poultry farmers combat avian flu and to make eggs affordable again,” she said.

On the campaign trail last year, President Donald Trump vowed to lower all food costs on “day one.” However, from December to January, supermarket prices rose at their fastest rate in more than two years.

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Economists blame eggs. According to statistics from the US Bureau of Labour Statistics and the CDC, egg costs reached a record high in January as avian influenza continues to decimate flocks around the country, including in Maryland.

During the presidential campaign, Donald J. Trump blamed the Biden administration for high inflation and promised to lower consumer prices. Now, Democrats have turned the tables, wondering why the Trump administration isn’t doing more to address egg costs that keep going up.

According to the most recent Consumer Price Index, egg prices increased at the quickest rate in nearly a decade during that time. Unless anything changes, Rollins’ department expects that egg costs will jump by more than 20% this year.

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One reason eggs are expensive and often difficult to obtain is an epidemic of highly virulent avian influenza, sometimes known as bird flu.

Last month, customers paid an average of $4.95 for a dozen large Grade A eggs, 13 cents more than the previous record set in 2023. Wholesale egg prices reached an all-time high of $7.86 in February, according to the economic data platform Trading Economics.

Since the impacts of the bird flu started showing up in egg pricing, the humble egg has become a political battering rod.

On February 16, Alvaro M. Bedoya, a Democratic commissioner on the Federal Trade Commission, turned to social media to urge Andrew Ferguson, Trump’s incoming head of the FTC, to “pay attention to what’s happening on grocery shelves” and look into egg business practices.

“I don’t know what’s happening in the egg industry, but it sure as hell seems we should be looking into it and see if there’s anticompetitive conduct that is hurting consumers,” Bedoya said during a conversation.

Similar requests from advocacy organisations and politicians were made to the FTC under the Biden administration, which did not initiate an antitrust probe against egg producers. Bedoya stated that at the time, the agency’s resources were primarily focused on other antitrust investigations, such as investigating the supermarket business.

Critics also believe the egg industry need a deeper examination. Farm Action, a nonprofit that fights corporate monopolies in food and agriculture, wrote to the FTC and the Justice Department on February 12 asking them to investigate alleged monopolisation and anticompetitive coordination in the industry.

“There’s smoke there that suggests there may be a fire underneath,” said Basel Musharbash, the principal attorney at Antimonopoly Counsel, an antitrust law and policy firm, who led the research for Farm Action’s letter. “The incentives are there, the power is there to restrain supply, and it seems like we need the F.T.C. or the D.O.J. to look and tell us if that power is actually being used.”

The egg industry stated that the bird flu had devastated farmers who had lost animals to the illness. At the same time, consumer demand for eggs has increased year on year for 23 straight months.

The Federal Trade Commission’s spokesperson declined to comment on whether the agency was contemplating initiating an inquiry. A Justice Department representative acknowledged that the antitrust division received Farm Action’s letter, but declined to comment further.