Innovate Animal Ag’s CEO talks HPAI with the American Enterprise Institute
Earlier this month, Innovate Animal Ag’s CEO, Robert Yaman, spoke on a panel organized by the American Enterprise Institute entitled “Highly Infectious Avian Flu and the Price of Eggs: Are There Pathways to a Solution?” The panel was attended by policymakers and administration officials who were interested in learning more about the impacts of Highly Pathogenic Avian Flu (HPAI) and what the government’s policy response should be.
On the panel, Robert emphasized the importance of vaccinating our layer flock to keep egg prices down in the long term, as well as addressed some of the public health and animal welfare issues associated with the disease. A lightly edited version of his opening statement is included below, and the recording of the full panel is available here.
Transcript
Robert Yaman, CEO Innovate Animal Ag, delivering his opening address at the recent AEI forum on HPAI
Note: This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and concision.
The emphasis that I want to mostly focus on today is thinking about the long term. So as we just heard, egg prices have been spiking recently, and that’s the reason we’ve all come here together today. But this is not the first time that egg prices were in mainstream news in the last few years. At the end of 2022 and the beginning of 2023, there was another supply shock due to the same bird flu outbreak that we're currently experiencing.
The outbreak that's currently ongoing has been going on for a number of years and has led to multiple spikes in the price of eggs. So the question then is, is this going to happen again? And if so, what are the steps we could be taking now to lower that risk?
When I speak to egg producers and folks that are on the ground, what I hear overwhelmingly is that we're not currently on track to ensure that this is not going to happen again. So when we think about the Biden administration’s policy response to bird flu, it’s clearly been unsuccessful in keeping down the price of eggs.
What we should be thinking about now is, how do we avoid making the same mistakes that we made in the past to prevent prices from spiking again at a potentially politically inopportune time, at the end of next year and the year after?
When it comes to the long term impacts of bird flu, egg prices are obviously a very important food security issue. There's also public health ramifications that I'm sure others will speak to more. There are important issues around animal health and animal welfare that I think Americans have shown that they deeply care about. There's also matters of protecting small farmers and small business owners from being put out of business by the disease.
Many of the proposals that Secretary Rollins discussed in her five point plan are positive. There's been also some proposals out there to increase the supply of eggs via other means, for example, lowering the restrictions on the use of surplus eggs from the chicken meat sector, which are subject to regulations which forbid them to be used as table eggs. I think these are all good ideas.
The only solution that we have right now to be proactive and protect against future price hikes due to supply shocks is vaccination, because that’s the only way we can be proactive in protecting our flocks from the disease.
Things like importing eggs, increasing the supply coming from the meat sector, funding biosecurity, these are all good, but they are ultimately reactive. They are responding to a crisis that's already happened.
That's not to say that vaccination will be easy by any means. There are certainly massive logistical and political challenges associated with it. The biggest issue right now is around trade. Currently, the way that many of our trade agreements with other countries are set up is that any sort of vaccination campaign, even if it's just for layers in the US, would open the possibility that our trade partners could ban the import of all poultry products, including chicken meat, from the US.
Now, this is a very important issue, because the chicken meat sector is a big exporter in the US. In that industry, about 15% of revenues are due to exports. And a lot of that is parts of the chicken that Americans don't really want to eat, like chicken feet exported to China, for example. To use words that some others have used, we can be vaccinating a layer in Michigan, and it would affect our ability to export a broiler from Mississippi, even though they're separate industries, separate flocks, and they don't really affect each other. So this is something where I think it is really important for the current administration to work together with our trade partners.
The second big logistical issue is, of course, the challenge of rolling out a vaccine and monitoring its effects across our hundreds of millions of layers in the country.
But I think, in discussions around bird flu, it's important not to be paralyzed by the complexity. One thing that I've noticed in discussions is oftentimes the challenges and the issues surrounding a potential vaccination campaign can take a front seat over what is fundamentally the right thing to do.
If you look to other countries, Mexico and France being two examples, other countries have successfully vaccinated to great effect. And these, in my mind, serve as proof that it is possible and the logistical issues are surmountable. I believe that our current administration, scientific community, and industry can figure out how to successfully protect our flocks through vaccination, and aggressively pursue that option for the common good.
