Retailers have been affected by egg shortage over the past six months

ABC NEWS (Australia)

If you've been grocery shopping recently, you may find yourself scrambling for eggs. A national shortage has led to several shops even limiting the number of cartons that customers can purchase. Avian health consultant, Dr Peter Scott says the outbreak of avian flu last year is largely to blame.

Transcript

00:00During that outbreak that occurred in 2024, three states were affected and three strains

00:08of high path avian influenza were involved.

00:11That meant there was over about 2 million layers depopulated, and that was about 10%

00:17of the national flock.

00:18So that's been quite significant.

00:20So that was the immediate cause of the egg shortage.

00:24And the resolution, we have to go through a resolution, which is depopulating the farm,

00:28doing disposal, and doing cleaning and disinfection.

00:32So that process takes many months.

00:34And then after that, they have to do a phase called resolution, which is now proving those

00:38particular farms are free of disease.

00:41So overall, that takes about six months.

00:43Then, of course, you have to repopulate these farms, and to repopulate these farms you need

00:47to get young day olds and grow them up, they're called pullets, and that takes about six months

00:52as well.

00:53And then, of course, you need to produce extra day olds, and you need the parents to produce

00:57those extra day olds, and that takes many months as well.

01:00So before we can even get back to normal population, we're looking at about 12 months.

01:04The high path avian influenza outbreaks we have in this country are associated with strains

01:09that actually come from our wild waterfowl.

01:11It's a spillover effect with free-range birds, particularly when they get cross-contamination

01:17with their commercial poultry, the virus spills over into commercial poultry, and then they

01:21get infected and start to die.

01:24In this case, we actually did not destroy any birds that weren't clinically affected

01:28by avian influenza.

01:30In previous times, we've had controlled areas, restricted areas, and we used to destroy everything

01:35in the restricted area, but that wasn't the case this time.

01:38We tried to maintain all these flocks, but all of the birds were destroyed, which included

01:43some pullets, a small number of ducks and broaders.

01:46They were all affected and were tested positive for the disease.

01:49At the moment, there's a code of welfare that has been finished, that has been completed,

01:54which is going to demand the phasing out of cage eggs.

01:58The timeframes are uncertain, and that's creating a lot of uncertainty in the industry, because

02:03to replace those with alternate systems like free-range and barn requires a lot of capital

02:07input.

02:09So that's also leading to a reluctance to spend money in the system at the moment to

02:15do more capital expansion because of that uncertainty.

02:19Then on top of that is that when you have free-range birds, it's very hard to control

02:23their biosecurity in regard to their horizontal contact with wild waterfowl.

02:28So consequently, it's paradoxical, while we consider free-range birds have better welfare,

02:33really we go back to the old disease situation.

02:36These birds now we find are much more difficult to control.

02:38They're internal and external parasites, vermin from things like foxes.

02:43They also have fecal-oral cycle, bacterial diseases.

02:46So the overall performance of birds in alternate systems is generally poorer and more expensive

02:52with a larger footprint.

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