Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins and her team at USDA in late February announced a $1 billion comprehensive strategy in an effort to help curb highly pathogenic avian influenza, protect the U.S. poultry industry and lower egg prices.
Since then, wholesale egg prices have stabilized and the secretary is to be commended for her aggressive approach to fighting this virus, which has been devastating to poultry producers and the nation’s egg supply.
Part of the five-point strategy included the temporary importation of eggs from foreign countries to be used in the egg breaking market, meaning they are pasteurized (cooked) and used as ingredients in items such as salad dressings, bread, cake mix, pasta, pancake mix, mayonnaise, ice cream, pie crusts, sauces, and many other everyday food products.
U.S. egg imports climbed to record levels in March from both Turkey and Mexico. Brazil, our largest global competitor for poultry, along with Honduras sent eggs to the U.S. for the first time in this decade, according to Commerce Department data. We imported more than $16.5 million worth of eggs in March, representing an almost threefold increase from February volumes, which was itself a fivefold increase on the previous month.
We find ourselves in a situation where we have millions of these same perfectly nutritious and safe eggs right here at home – Made in the USA – but we’re being forced to throw them out because of an outdated Obama-era regulation.
“Broilers” are chickens raised for meat. “Layers” are hens that lay the eggs that go to grocery stores, restaurants, and to breakers to be pasteurized for egg products. These eggs are known as “table eggs” or “shell eggs.” Broilers and layers are uniquely different and make up separate industries.
Due to fluctuating market conditions, broiler hatcheries, in some instances, have more eggs on hand than what they want to hatch. These are known as “surplus” hatching eggs. Before 2009, broiler producers could sell these surplus eggs to egg processors, known as “breakers,” to be pasteurized and used in egg products. However, under President Barack Obama, FDA implemented a new rule effectively preventing these eggs to be sold to breakers.
When eggs are delivered from a breeding farm to a broiler hatchery, they are stored in a room kept at 65 degrees before they are placed in incubators to be hatched. Research has shown this is the ideal temperature to store these eggs prior to incubation – warmer temperatures would induce the incubation process too soon, and colder temperatures compromise the viability of an eventual hatch.
But the 2009 FDA rule, which was focused on the safety of “table eggs,” or the eggs you buy in your grocery store, stated that all eggs sent anywhere in the U.S. food supply must be kept at 45°F within 36 hours after being laid.
These requirements make sense for table eggs, which are raw products, but the rule makes no sense for any egg which is to be pasteurized, including surplus broiler eggs.
As a direct result of the 2009 FDA rule, U.S. broiler producers stopped selling surplus hatching eggs to egg breakers and instead are forced to render or throw these eggs away, often at an additional cost. NCC estimates that more than 5.4 billion eggs have been wasted and sent to landfills rather than tables since the rule was implemented, at a cost to the broiler industry of $27 million annually, for a total of $350 million.
FDA never suggested that these surplus broiler eggs were unsafe or that pasteurization was ineffective.
Because egg products are pasteurized, they are ensured a high level of food safety. A 2020 joint FDA-USDA risk assessment confirmed these products present extremely low public risk due to the “extremely high pasteurization efficiency” of the egg-breaking pasteurization process.
The good news is that there is mounting pressure to modify this outdated regulation. The National Chicken Council petitioned the FDA in late February to do just that.
Following the petition, Rep. Josh Riley, D-N.Y., in March introduced “The Lowering Egg Prices Act” with Dusty Johnson, R-S.D., Pat Harrigan, R-N.C., and Kristen McDonald Rivet, D-Mich., which would reverse or modify this 15-year-old regulation. Also in March, a bipartisan group of more than a dozen members of the House wrote to Acting FDA Commissioner Sara Brenner, urging the agency to grant NCC’s petition.
Granting NCC’s request would release almost 400 million eggs into the egg-breaking supply each year, thus freeing up the much-coveted table eggs from being used in the breaking market and stemming egg imports.
The temporary importation of eggs achieved its goal, but let’s focus on what we have right here at home. It’s time to Make Eggs American Again.
