Egg prices rise to record high despite White House optimism

Egg prices rose to a record high in March of $6.23 per dozen despite optimism from the White House last month. 

The price for a dozen grade A large eggs jumped from February’s $5.90 to $6.23, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).  It was $4.95 per dozen in January. 

Overall, the index for food jumped 0.4 percent last month, BLS reported on Thursday, with the index for poultry, fish, eggs and meats going up by 1.3 percent. The index has increased by 7.9 percent in the last year, while the eggs index increased by just over 60 percent. 

With Easter coming up on April 20, the demand for eggs tends to rise. 

Trump said last month that “when I took it over, eggs were through the roof, and now eggs are down.” 

The White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in mid-March that “wholesale egg prices, they continue to fall.” 

“A dozen eggs are now $3.10 cheaper since January 24. That’s a 47 percent decrease overall,” she added at the time. “So I think the American people do have great reason to be optimistic about this economy.”

While wholesale egg prices, those distributors pay from middlemen, have gone down in March, according to the Department of Agriculture, consumer prices have not followed. 

The blame for the rising prices of eggs in January and February was placed on bird flu outbreaks that forced farms to kill millions of chickens to curb the spread of the virus. 

Nearly 36 million birds were affected by the virus in the first two months of the year, Agriculture Department data shows. Some 2.1 million were affected in March. 

Whenever a bird gets the virus, the whole flock gets slaughtered to prevent the highly pathogenic avian influenza from advancing further. 

The administration said in March that it was importing eggs from Turkey and South Korea. 

“We are talking in the hundreds of millions of eggs for the short term. So not insignificant, but significant enough to help continue to bring the prices down for right now,” Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said. “And then when our chicken populations are repopulated, and we’ve got a full egg-laying industry going again, hopefully in a couple of months, we then shift back to our internal egg-layers and moving those eggs out onto the shelf.”

In February, the price of eggs was $5.9, according to BLS data.