U.S. authorities have turned to Europe for help with the country's severe egg shortage.
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The shortfall is due to bird flu, which has plagued the United States for several years.
“The US have asked virtually every country in Europe,” said Danish industry representative Jørgen Nyberg Larsen.
Larsen said suppliers and industry groups in Germany, Spain, France, the Netherlands, Italy and fellow Nordic countries have received similar requests.
The requests come amid a growing Trump-driven trade riff between the US and its European partners.
In late February, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) office in The Hague reached out to European countries regarding potential supplies, Larsen said.
By early March, the USDA followed up with a request to assess the quantities each country could provide.
While Finland has declined to send eggs, other countries are willing to assist.
"The amount we could export would not solve their egg shortage," says the head of the Finnish Poultry Association.
Turkey has agreed to provide the US with 15,000 tonnes of egg to curb prices.
Other countries remain primarily focused on ensuring supply for consumers within the EU.
Another major hurdle potential hurdle for would-be exporters is that the US washes its eggs, a practice that is uncommon in most EU countries and even illegal in parts of the bloc.
As a result, any EU egg exports would have to undergo additional processing before reaching US consumers.
Egg prices reached a record high in the United States during February according to the US Consumer Price Index, with farmers forced to slaughter over 166 million birds so far in total as avian flu has spread – mostly egg-laying chickens.
The rapid spread of the highly infectious avian flu virus H5N1 has reached an “unprecedented” scale, wiping out hundreds of millions of birds worldwide and increasingly spilling over into mammals, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) warned.
FAO Deputy Director-General Godfrey Magwenzi stressed that the crisis threatens to have “serious impacts on food security and food supply in countries, including loss of valuable nutrition, rural jobs and income, shocks to local economies, and of course increasing costs to consumers.” ■
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