Egg companies are getting government bailouts while price-gouging consumers

https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/5275227-egg-price-inflation-cal-maine/

Egg prices reached another record high last month. It now costs American shoppers an average of $6.23 for a dozen eggs — nearly a five-fold increase since 2020.

Yet while families have been squeezed by grocery sticker shock, agriculture corporations have been raking in record profits. Cal-Maine, the country’s largest egg producer, took in $509 million this quarter alone, tripling its profits from a year ago.

Gouging consumers is bad enough. But it gets worse: Cal-Maine and other ag companies were breaking the bank at the same time they were also quietly getting millions in taxpayer-funded relief payments from the federal government. Congress and the Trump administration must put a stop to this: No company that is getting corporate subsidies should be allowed to hike prices and extract windfall profits from American consumers.

Exorbitant egg prices have ostensibly been caused by repeated avian flu outbreaks in recent years. Or at least that’s the industry’s story. As the advocacy organization Farm Action explained in a letter to the Federal Trade Commission, over the last two years, some 115 million egg-laying chickens have been culled in response to avian flu outbreaks — a tragically large loss of animal life, but a relative drop in the bucket in the grand scheme of the country’s poultry industry. Even after this reduction in the country’s chicken supply, monthly egg production only dipped about 4 percent.

*snip*