(NewsNation) — Egg shortages and high prices have largely been blamed on an outbreak of bird flu, but a new watchdog report says companies are creating the crisis by price gouging their customers.
According to data from the United States Department of Agriculture, the price of eggs has nearly doubled in the last six weeks, with the average cost of a dozen at around $8.
Bird flu, which has spread poultry and also affected dairy herds, has “slightly reduced” egg production, but “corporate greed has also played a major role,” a report from Food and Water Watch published Wednesday said.
According to the report, about 10 companies control the vast majority of the eggs produced in America, and they dictate egg prices whether there’s a bird flu outbreak or not.
One of these companies, the Mississippi-based Cal-Maine Foods, increased their profits by 7.5 times over the first year of the bird flu outbreak — despite not having outbreaks in their own flocks that fiscal year, Food and Water Watch found. During that fiscal year, from June 2022 through May 2023, Cal-Maine actually sold 7 percent more eggs compared to FY2021.
The report says Cal-Maine Foods “commanded prices from its buyers that were much higher than needed to cover rising costs, at a time when national egg prices were skyrocketing.”
“Basically, they just raised their prices and locked up with national prices. They had no reason to,” Amanda Starbuck, research director for Food and Water Watch, said.
In FY2021, Cal-Maine took in $0.15 per dozen eggs produced and sold, according to the report. It then made $1.14 per dozen eggs in FY2023, and sold over 1 billion eggs.
“That’s $1 billion dollars in windfall profits that they made from the consumers having to pay more for eggs,” Starbuck said.
Cal-Maine did not respond to the Associated Press’s request for comment.
American Egg Board President Emily Metz said prices have nothing to do with anything other than bird flu.
“I think to suggest anything else is a misreading of the facts and the reality,” American Egg Board President Emily Metz said. “Our farmers are in the fight of their lives, period, full stop. And they’re doing everything they can to keep these birds safe.. .This is a supply challenge due to bird flu. Nothing else.”
Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins pushed back against criticism that the higher cost of eggs was solely the result of avian flu when she unveiled a nearly $1 billion plan to fight the current price spike.
Instead, she attributed the current situation to “the high cost of inputs, the unbelievable amount of regulation, the shutting down of our export markets.”
Rollins’s plan includes $500 million for biosecurity measures to “lock the barns down” and initiatives to repopulate flocks after what she described as the depopulation of nearly 160 million birds under the Biden administration.
NewsNation digital producer Damita Menezes and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
