https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/egg-prices-avian-flu-canada-us-1.7450654
It’s not an unsolvable problem. Eggs in Canada are cheap and have remained cheap. The problem is with unchecked capitalism.
America is in the find out phase when it comes to fucking around with letting capitalism min max ‘efficiency’ over resiliency.
At the cost of still having the factory farming the original article talks about. Animal agriculture’s many problems are often worse in the US but don’t pretend they don’t exist elsewhere
Canada, however, remains the Western leader in hen confinement, with 83 percent of egg-laying hens still confined to battery cages as of last year [2021] – 27 percent in enriched cages, according to Mercy.
https://sentientmedia.org/enriched-versus-cage-free-eggs/
[In 2024] over 81% of Canada’s hens remain in “enriched” cages, which offer minimal improvements over traditional battery cages, restricting natural behaviours like wing flapping, perching, and dust bathing.
Yeah, factory farming is still shit, but there is a structural difference with allowing farms to concentrate to the level that American farms do. When an infectious disease hits, you cull a far greater proportion of the population.
Supply management doesn’t solve all ethical issues with eggs and dairy, but it is still a better system than unregulated free market capitalism.
And much of the world is heading that way - not away from it. Think of it only a US problem at your own peril
The article is literally entirely about how Canada’s supply management system prevents us from moving that direction.
The article also doesn’t say they couldn’t or wouldn’t intensify operations any further. They talk about the state today, not down the line in the future
Going back to the original article’s idea, People demaning lower prices tends to put pressure on them to do so whenever prices rise for any reason. Regardless of being diseases related
See also the UK who’s historically claimed how they do things differently and now has over 1000 megafarms
The article also doesn’t say they couldn’t or wouldn’t intensify operations any further. They talk about the state today, not down the line in the future
Yes it does. It literally says that our supply management system is designed to spread out production across regions so that you can’t ever have that many eggs produced in a single place.
If you’re saying ‘well maybe Canada will throw out it’s supply management system and do something completely different’ then sure, literally anything can happen in the future, that’s not a meaningful point. The point is that Canada’s supply management system prioritizes production being distributed over greater areas which inherently leads to smaller farms and helps to prevent the spread of disease, and is a better system than the American one of mass concentration and racing to the bottom.
A supply chain management system is not the strong protection you might think it is. Factory farming has continued to consolidate with it in place. Especially with it being something that most all egg farms are not involved in to begin with
The number of chicken farms has declined 88 percent; while in the same period of time in the United States, the number of dairy farms dropped by 88 percent.[34][3] Supply-managed farms represent 8% to 13% of all farms in the country.[194]
[…]
Hall Findlay says that even with supply management, "[t]here has been more consolidation in dairy, poultry and eggs than in almost every other agricultural sector
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dairy_and_poultry_supply_management_in_Canada#Policy
Clearly you can do stuff to bring agricultural prices down, BUT with the bird flu going around don’t expect miracles in egg prices. If somehow, magically, high egg prices are the only negative effect we will encounter related to bird flu, we are extremely lucky.
Maximizing profit got us into this mess. The problem isn’t with charging less.
The article makes good points about how corporate farming has introduced cruelty and disease. But vaccinations exist, and eggs were cheap before there was mass corporate farming.
Expectations that it should be cheap drive up that consumption. Per capita consumption has gone up. It fundamentally can’t work at mass consumption and production levels we see today
The process of producing animal products is inherently quite inefficient. It takes quite a lot of feed to do so at scale and you lose a lot of that energy
That’s going to always push you towards factory farming at scale because it’s horrifying but more efficient resource wise (still many magnitudes less efficent than eating plants directly)
For some examples, lets look at something like beef production. Your best case you would think of is probably something like only grass-fed production. But there isn’t enough land to support anything close to current consumption
we find that a nationwide shift to exclusively grass-fed beef would require increasing the national cattle herd from 77 to 100 million cattle, an increase of 30%. We also find that the current pastureland grass resource can support only 27% of the current beef supply (27 million cattle), an amount 30% smaller than prior estimates
Why the focus on “efficiency” with food? The purpose of food in human culture goes way beyond caloric efficiency, and honestly caloric efficiency is the last thing we should consider when discussing food supplies. We don’t want to, nor do we need to, get into a race to the bottom where we destroy all food culture because it turns out that eating bugs is the most space and resource efficient way to create food.
Not to mention the unspoken assumption when we start talking about food efficiency that the human population of earth should be maximized because we want to be efficient in our food consumption, therefore we should restrict our diet to the bare minimum so that we can support more people.
This is not some trivial difference. I talk about efficiency because we’re talking about substantial portions of entire global resources. The difference is many order of magnitudes between any animal products and plants. It’s enough to change the entire environment of our planet
I think that deserves far more weight than “culture”. Because something is tradition is no good reason to keep doing something
Research suggests that if everyone shifted to a plant-based diet, we would reduce global land use for agriculture by 75%. This large reduction of agricultural land use would be possible thanks to a reduction in land used for grazing and a smaller need for land to grow crops.
https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets
And that land for instance can come from places like the Amazon rainforest
Extensive cattle ranching is the number one culprit of deforestation in virtually every Amazon country, and it accounts for 80% of current deforestation
Forbid food exports, problem solved. Americans can grow their own food and enjoy their own burgers on their own land just fine.
This is not a problem of exports. The US eats way animal products more per capita. If everyone ate like Americans, we would need 137% of the world’s habitable land which includes forests, urban areas, arable and non-arable land, etc. Cutting down every forest wouldn’t even be enough
The land usage itself isn’t free either. It comes with costs
Livestock farmers often claim that their grazing systems “mimic nature”. If so, the mimicry is a crude caricature. A review of evidence from over 100 studies found that when livestock are removed from the land, the abundance and diversity of almost all groups of wild animals increases
And that’s not to mention the emissions which are enough to make us miss climate targets on their own if we ignore them. We must address fossil fuels and animal agriculture
To have any hope of meeting the central goal of the Paris Agreement, which is to limit global warming to 2°C or less, our carbon emissions must be reduced considerably, including those coming from agriculture. Clark et al. show that even if fossil fuel emissions were eliminated immediately, emissions from the global food system alone would make it impossible to limit warming to 1.5°C and difficult even to realize the 2°C target. Thus, major changes in how food is produced are needed if we want to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement.
(emphasis mine)
it turns out that eating bugs
I just don’t understand why this particular thing comes up all the time. Is there someone seriously proposing that?
I know the conspiracy theorists loooove to talk about it as if Bill Gates along with some “they” is planning that for all of the rest of us, based on something said at WEF one time, but…?
I just don’t understand why this particular thing comes up all the time. Is there someone seriously proposing that?
I know the conspiracy theorists loooove to talk about it as if Bill Gates along with some “they” is planning that for all of the rest of us, based on something said at WEF one time, but…?
I’m sure the alex jones crew bring it up all the time when talking about the secret global conspiracy or whatever, but I bring it up because bugs are a legitimate food source. One that is extremely efficient in terms of both resources and space, but just because eating bugs is more “efficient” then eating beef, doesn’t mean that we should all eat bugs. Generally this is uncontroversial, but some environmentalists dismiss food culture and variety of diets amongst humans in pursuit of maximizing some other metric but they aren’t very clear on what their goals are, let alone the why.
No it’s not
It’s one of theost clearly visible symptoms of the disease, currently.
Yeah, 2 dollar cartons produced by egg factories with 20 chickens in a small box is also not right, doh, and yes, it got us where we are now.
But eggs shouldn’t have to cost 13+ USD either and at this point, that IS Trump’s fault. He could have and should have jumped on this, break up the big factories, push for smaller free range places, etc, but instead he is playing tyrant and war games.
My Canadian free range, grain fed eggs are way cheaper than the cheapest factory farmed American eggs…
Maybe look at your president if you don’t like the prices ?
Well clearly a bait and switch article here.
I don’t know about the rest of you but every carton of eggs I see says “cage free”. Maybe that’s a regional thing, but it seems consumers have voted against factory farms. I don’t know if the term means anything and perhaps the first step is to make it so
