(C) Daily Yonder - Keep it Rural
This story was originally published by Daily Yonder - Keep it Rural and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .
Insisting on Cheaper Eggs Is a Huge Mistake [1]
['Jan Dutkiewicz', 'Bryce Covert', 'Mike Pearl', 'Alexander C. Kaufman', 'Liza Featherstone', 'Kate Aronoff']
Date: 2025-02-03
When H5N1 or a similar disease is found in a flock of birds—and “flock” refers to the tens if not hundreds of thousands of birds in a given production facility—all those birds are culled. The site is disinfected, and then the sheds are crammed full of new hens as soon as possible to get the supply of eggs flowing again. When I wrote earlier that H5N1 is “responsible for” over a hundred million deaths, this is what I meant: Many birds were killed by the disease, but the majority were culled to stop the disease from spreading. Poultry and egg companies, in turn, are indemnified for the value of their birds they cull by the federal government through the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, or APHIS. Through January 2025, APHIS had paid out over a billion dollars in indemnity payments. These payments make it easier for companies to restart their operations, increasing the supply of eggs in the market but also increasing the risk for new outbreaks. Many companies have received multiple government bailouts after multiple outbreaks. In other words, existing approaches incentivize rather than mitigate risk.
As H5N1 ravaged the poultry and egg industries and then made the jump to cows, leading to culls of infected dairy cattle and infections of dairy workers, the reaction from regulators was slow and patchy, with testing and reporting of the disease varying from state to state and from farm to farm. And even as the USDA, at the time led by former dairy industry lobbyist Tom Vilsack, released funds to the industry to contain spread of the disease, one exposé suggested that the USDA allowed for “an unspoken ‘don’t test, don’t tell’ policy among dairy farmers.”
Actually reducing zoonotic risk in the food system probably means more expensive eggs. In the short term, tighter biosecurity protocols and more monitoring by state agencies (and likely even more culls as more positive cases are detected) would slow and constrain production, driving prices up. The same would happen with any broader, long-term fiscal policies, like a proposal made by a team of European economists for a “zoonotic tax” to be levied on industries that present zoonotic risks. The tax would be applied, for example, to egg farms to disincentivize production or help raise the funds for a response to any potential disease outbreak. This is similar to the wide range of proposals that have suggested that food prices should internalize the costs of their broader environmental and health impacts, which would particularly affect meat, eggs, and dairy. None of this would be politically popular. Indeed, the animal agriculture industry is clamoring for less regulation, and consumers are clamoring for cheap eggs.
[END]
---
[1] Url:
https://newrepublic.com/article/191040/cost-eggs-democrats-trump-h5n1
Published and (C) by Daily Yonder - Keep it Rural
Content appears here under this condition or license: Creative Commons CC BY-ND 4.0 International.
via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailyyonder/
