After insulting Canada by threatening its independence and suggesting it should become part of the United States, the Trump administration may now have to humble itself by asking the former ally to increase egg exports—just as tariffs on Canadian products are set to take effect on Tuesday.
Currently, a dozen eggs cost as much as between $8 and $10 due to the avian flu outbreak, and importing them is the only way to lower prices (in the fall, the price ranged between $2 and $3). Given that Trump was elected in part by promising to lower consumer goods prices “from day one,” this situation is not great publicity.
Americans are big egg consumers, using them for breakfast and in baking. In 2023, the average American consumed 281 eggs per year, or about 5.4 eggs per week.
The government is indeed trying to boost imports, as admitted by Commerce Secretary Brooke Rollins in an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal, where she spoke of “temporary import options to reduce egg prices in the short term.” However, the number one egg exporter to the U.S. is Canada.
Other top suppliers include the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and China, according to 2023 data. The UK may avoid U.S. tariffs after the recent White House meeting between Trump and Prime Minister Keir Starmer. However, Trump has promised to impose a 25% tariff on goods from the EU bloc, which includes the Netherlands. Just last Wednesday, he also declared that the European Union was created “to rip off the United States.”
China was already hit with a 10% tariff in February, far from the 60% promised during Trump’s campaign but still enough to escalate tensions.
The tariffs imposed on these countries generally apply across all sectors, and eggs are no exception.
One of the few countries that has maintained friendly ties with Trump—perhaps due to his relationship with authoritarian President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan—is Turkey, which recently announced plans to export a record 420 million eggs to the United States.
However, this is unlikely to have a major impact on the U.S. egg shortage. That number represents less than 5% of the total eggs produced in the U.S. in January alone.
