I was lying with my mouth open, staring up at a poster of a palm tree, when my dentist started complaining about the price of eggs. She’d just spent £37 on a small bag of basic groceries. But it was the price of eggs that was really freaking her out. I look fairly agricultural even in my town clothes, so she asked me: “Why is food becoming so expensive?” Half my mouth was numb by this point, and full of metal implements, but I tried my best to answer.
The price of eggs in the UK has risen almost 20% since the start of the year; in Morrisons, a six-pack rose from £1.90 to £2.25 in just over a month. This is bad news for British egg-lovers, who rely on them as a cheap source of protein and nutrition in an otherwise obesogenic food environment. Last year, the UK consumed about 13 billion eggs — that’s around 200 for each and every one of us. And the poorer you are, the more of your income is spent on groceries, and so the skyrocketing cost of eggs hits even harder.
It’s a relatively new problem. For decades, cheap groceries were taken for granted; eggs became cheaper and cheaper over the past century, until in 2020 they were a third of their 1920 price. Yet food prices are once again becoming a hot political issue, in both Britain and the United States. During the most recent US election, nine out of 10 voters polled said they were concerned about food inflation. JD Vance visited a supermarket and lamented that eggs were $4 per dozen because the Democrats couldn’t manage the economy. The store sign behind him actually priced the eggs at $2.99, but, as ever with populists, the facts didn’t matter much, because Vance was tapping into a real public concern — one that urban liberals tend to ignore because farming is outside their zone of interest.
President Trump promised voters he would bring food prices down. But the cost of eggs has risen sharply since then. An American friend of mine recently paid $9 a dozen in her local store — and, in California especially, that’s no longer unusual. Some American supermarkets, including Walmart, are now rationing the number of eggs a person can buy per day. And last week, America’s agricultural secretary, Brooke Rollins, told Americans that if they wanted a reliable supply of eggs, they should keep chickens in their backyards.
So what is going on with eggs? The short answer is the HPAI bird flu virus, which has wreaked chaos globally. If you’ve been to the seaside in the past year or two, you may have seen dead seabirds washing up and down on the tide or lying crumpled on the sand. The virus is ever-present in wild bird populations, and creates havoc when it infects domesticated poultry, as it increasingly does.
We all like the idea of hens running around in a yard or field for a few hours each day, but when this happens, they often come into contact with wild birds, or with their faeces or carcasses, and catch the flu. Given the compact nature of industrial farming, the infection will then spread quickly among other hens. The solution up until now has been to slaughter the affected flocks: more than 160 million American hens have been taken out so far, and 47 million since the start of December. In the UK, 1.8 million farmed birds have been killed on 33 farms since December, including more than one million on one Shropshire farm. One reason why we’re seeing the cost of eggs rise is simply that fewer are being laid.
Yet avian flu is by no means the full story, because lots of other food items are also getting more expensive. The more complicated explanation is that the era of ever-cheaper food is over. We are reaching the limit of our ability to cheapen food staples.
All around the world, populations are growing and becoming more affluent, and when people get richer, they want more and better food. Demand is therefore rising, but as the old saying goes, “they aren’t making any more land”. And clearing more forest or wilderness for farming is deeply unfashionable for sensible environmental reasons. So supply is not magically rising as it once did.
The challenge for farmers, then, is to produce more food from the same amount of land. For the past century or more, we have done this over and over again, thanks to innovations such as the Haber-Bosch process, which takes nitrogen from the air and makes it into little white globules that are plant food. We bred faster growing pigs, hens that lay more eggs, milkier cows, beefier steers, heavier yielding crops, and developed remarkably productive industrialised systems. Farming in the UK is 30% more productive overall than in 1990.
But it’s not clear that we can continue on this path of optimisation, as our methods in some farming sectors are swiftly becoming less effective. The Haber-Bosch process, for one thing, is a time-limited magic trick that is now wearing off, as the synthetic ammonia it produces, which is used to make industrial fertiliser, is degrading the soil. This makes growing grain less efficient, and therefore costlier. And when the price of chicken feed goes up, so does the price of eggs.
Not only are productivity gains much harder to come by now, but we actually have less land devoted to food production than in the past. And with this we must feed many millions more people. Today, we need land for heaps of different things, from building a million new homes in the UK, to solar farms to rewilding projects to producing biofuels. All this drives up buyer competition for land, raising its value, and indirectly increasing the cost of food.
As a result, Britain’s farmland is vanishing. The Council for the Protection of Rural England estimates that, since 2010, 14,500 hectares of farmland that could grow 250,000 tonnes of vegetables a year has been lost to development. Nearly 300,000 homes have been built on 8,000 acres of prime farmland. And the government is waging a culture war on “nimbies” and “blockers” who want to stop them.
Can Britain afford to make such a sacrifice? The Office of National Statistics estimates that the number of people in the UK will rise to 78 million by 2050, and so the demand for food will naturally soar. But how can we feed all of these people without protecting farmland? We certainly can’t rely on foreign imports — as the developing world grows more affluent, it is grabbing the food Britain would once have relied upon, originally from our empire, and later from our membership of the EU. The old liberal global order, which we depend upon for our global food supply, is falling apart, and Britain has isolated itself from all the major geopolitical trading blocks. Trump made matters worse last week when he announced that American farmers should start producing more food for the US market, rather than for export, ahead of looming tariffs in April.
The British egg crisis is therefore part of a much larger agricultural catastrophe. We discovered a way to produce the cheapest eggs in history, through giant industrial farms, but in doing so made our food supply highly vulnerable to disease. This leads to volatility in supply, and inflated prices when it goes wrong. And it’s all part of a global just-in-time, super-cheap food system that relies on massive farms and processing facilities that are just too big to fail.
When we destroyed the old system based on thousands of small farms and allowed a handful of corporations to manage whole sectors of farming, as we’ve done in the egg industry, we laid ourselves open to exploitation, to anti-competitive cartels and monopolies. Indeed, there is a growing suspicion in the US that by manipulating bottlenecks in the supply chain, such as the number of chicks produced for laying hen farms, some companies may be “price gouging” — a fancy word for manufacturing scarcity to drive up prices and profits.
It doesn’t help that the British government treats agriculture with contempt and pays little regard to the problem of food security. It signs trade deals that allow foreign producers with lower agricultural standards to out-compete British farmers on the supermarket shelves. And it has created a greater tax liability on land, hitting elderly farmers who have failed to hand the farm on. It’s no wonder the average farm now struggles to make enough to pay the farmer the national average wage.
Then there’s the question of subsidies. The last Tory government dismantled production subsidies, and Labour has failed to replace them equitably with a much talked about “green transition”. This has had serious consequences — especially for farms like ours, which used to operate on the principle that we were feeding the nation; even if we lost money on the farming, we were always bailed out at the end of the year by the support payment. But now that support has been taken away, we simply have to make a profit. Which is fine for us but has a massive implication for the food system. If a food product doesn’t pay now, then we either produce less of it or charge more for it. And that’s why there are far wilder swings in food pricing than in the past.
This brings us back to eggs again. Although eggs were not part of the last subsidy system, egg farmers benefited from the cheap grain it resulted in. Now, when the price of grain and thus chicken feed rises too high, egg farmers can simply pause their operations until the price drops again. This signals a dramatic break from the old subsidy days: today, when farmers aren’t making a profit, they’ll just stop farming — which spells disaster for Britain’s food security.
As it stands, the major British parties are failing to deal with food, farming, and land-based issues effectively. This is worsening an already difficult cost-of-living crisis. Inflation in the UK rose to 3% in January, and, according to the BBC, food price inflation is a key driver of that. Unless the Government can find the money to either subsidise inflated food prices or else put more money in people’s pockets, they’ll struggle to sell Net Zero, or many other expensive, progressive programmes to the public. Rural America has already fled into the arms of the populists — and rural Britain may not be far behind.
This might, then, be a good moment for Britain to rethink its attitude to agriculture. We have to get real about the costs and risks of producing food. We also need to reward smaller farms, which tend to be more resilient and robust than industrial ones. If we had protected smaller farms in the past and paid a little more for their eggs, we would not be so dependent now upon industrial-scale operations that create vast price spikes when things go wrong. Cheapening food beyond a certain point is an illusion: at some point we’ll have to face up to the real cost of food, and that real cost is likely to rise.
The big question is how to ensure people can afford food at its true price — a problem solved in places like Norway by the redistribution of wealth. We currently rely on cheap food to mask the prevalence of poverty in Britain, but that trick relies on subsidised farming and technological breakthroughs that are now slowing. The thing to do now is to create far more jobs that pay decently, so that people can still afford their weekly supermarket shops.
For too long, we’ve acted like agriculture is not our problem: it’s a yokel issue, that’s nothing to do with us. But now we have no eggs for breakfast. We have neglected to think clearly about farming and food, and now it seems the chickens are coming home to roost — or not, because they are sick.
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Source: UnHerd Read the original article here: https://unherd.com/
