Nelson Zandbergen
Farmers Forum
OTTAWA — The avian flu crisis has driven up the price of eggs in the U.S. but not so much in Canada and you can thank our supply management system, says the professor who supply-managed farmers love to loathe.
Supply management ensures that supply matches demand, preventing prices from skyrocketing, and more importantly allows for a better crisis response, professor Sylvain Charlebois, director of the Agri-Food Analystics Lab at Dalhousie University, told Farmers Forum.
American egg prices have taken flight in recent months, recently hitting more than $6 USD a dozen (about $8 CDN) in some states. Egg prices were up almost 60 % in December 2022 over December 2021, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Some Americans have taken to crossing the border to buy eggs in Mexico. A popular online internet joke likens a dozen American eggs as a substitute for a diamond engagement ring.
Meanwhile, in Canada, a dozen eggs reached about $3.75 CDN in December, according to Statistics Canada, up about 16 % from a year earlier.
The difference boils down to a cultural lack of competitive pressure between Canadian egg farmers because of their longstanding quota-based production system, versus their free-market counterparts in the US, according to Charlebois. “Our supply management system is absolutely helping us,” he says. “It’s very well coordinated and we’re able to actually manage the menace of avian flu. So we’ve done a better job just because (farmers) are talking to each other, and they’re not afraid to signal problems to one another. It does give us an advantage.”
American producers, however, are less likely to reveal information about their farms, lest a competitor take advantage, and this has meant a less efficient response to avian flu south of the border, he adds. Producers simply don’t want to lose business to another producer and are often tight-lipped about challenges on the farm. “You don’t want to disclose, you don’t want to be the bad guy, you don’t want to lose money.”
More than 58 million poultry birds have been culled in the US as a result of Avian flu outbreaks, according the US Centers for Disease Control. In Canada, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency reports over 7 million birds culled as of end of Feb. 9.
