Last week, a meeting of Australian agriculture ministers agreed to phase out the production of battery eggs by 2036, in accordance with the new national animal welfare standards and guidelines for poultry.
The industry and its supporters were in uproar, saying that they needed more time to adjust to avoid financial penalties for farmers and consumers. Animal welfare advocates, meanwhile, said the timeline is too long. The market share of cage eggs on supermarket shelves has fallen from 70% in 2009 to just over 30% in 2023. Up to 70% of the transition has already taken place, animal advocates say.
To understand what’s going on, it’s worth looking back through egg policy history.
In 1999, Europe and the UK began a process to phase out the sale of cage eggs, resulting in a ban that came into effect in 2012. That same year, New Zealand announced a 10-year phaseout of cage eggs (which came into effect on 1 January 2023). Pressure mounted for Australia to follow suit.
In 2013, Coles and Woolworths announced that they would stop stocking cage eggs by 2025. In 2014, McDonald’s Australia set a goal of using only cage-free eggs from 2017. Also in 2014, the ACT became the first Australian jurisdiction to ban battery cages.
In 2015, Australia began a review of the national poultry standards, to replace the 15-year-old voluntary guidelines. The review received more than 160,000 submissions. The egg industry stepped up its campaigning.
When the draft standards were released in 2018, the then Egg Farmers of Australia chief executive, John Dunn, told reporters that phasing out cage eggs was a “radical suggestion” (they had already been banned in Europe for five years at this point) that would hurt production and increase the price of eggs.
The finalised Australian national poultry standards were quietly uploaded to the department of agriculture’s website in August 2022. They stated that egg producers would have to phase out the use of conventional layer hen cages over the next 10 to 15 years, and by 2036 at the latest, depending on the age of their current infrastructure. It notes that final timeframe would be set by individual states and territories.
The guidelines still allow for chickens to be held in cages, if they are larger and allow for natural behaviours like roosting and nesting. These are sometimes called enriched cages and are also still legal in the UK. Shared cages must have 750cm sq of usable space for each hen, and individual cages must be 1m sq, the same as the minimum space requirement for outdoor free range hens.
The egg industry said the guidelines “totally ignored evidence on why conventional cage eggs should continue to 2046”.
That evidence, they say, is that a loan to pay off an egg farm can have a 30-year term and that requiring the phaseout in 14 years rather than 24 “could drive many family egg farmers to the wall”.
The animal welfare argument for banning conventional hen cages is well known. So well known, that the industry and its loudest advocates have shifted to a cost of living argument.
Last week the Daily Telegraph warned that banning cage eggs could see the price of eggs rise to $15 a carton, a figure that appears to come from the industry, and lead to Australia facing a national egg shortage. The federal agriculture minister, Murray Watt, said those figures “have no credibility”.
The animal welfare group Australian Alliance for Animals offered some counter-modelling, suggesting the price of free range eggs, which are bought by 64% of Australian consumers, may decrease by up to 4% due to increased competition.
This is all grist for the mill. It is difficult to meaningfully predict the effect of any policy change on the shelf price of any grocery items in a high inflation market that has seen supermarket prices increase 10% in the past year alone.
That bring us back to last week, when the state and territory agriculture ministers agreed to adopt the new national standards but refused to agree to a timeframe around the phaseout of cage eggs.
Western Australia committed to phasing out cage eggs by 2032; while New South Wales released a terse statement three days later saying it has “secured a degree of flexibility in relation to the timing of the phaseout of caged eggs” but “does not believe there will be any need to extend beyond the 2036”.
Yet still, 12 months after the guidelines were announced, eight years after regulatory process began, and 11 years after discussion of banning cage eggs in Australia began in earnest, the industry said change was coming too quickly.
In a statement released after the meeting, Egg Farmers of Australia CEO, Melinda Hashimoto, said while free range and barn laid producers had been given “a green light to expand,” cage egg producers had “no clear picture about their future in the Australian supply chain”.
She again said that 2046 was the preferred timeline. The industry body has warned that farmers may seek compensation if production ceases before then, again on the argument of a 30-year loan.
Theoretically, if you started a cage egg business the year the national poultry standards went into review, it would be 2046 before that loan was paid off.
It is hard to imagine anyone surveying the egg market in 2016, when the move to free range was already well under way, and deciding that caged eggs were the way to go. But assuming that did occur: there were 13 years to adapt. Thirteen years to refinance. Or, to put in other terms, about nine lifetimes for the average caged chicken.
Change in any industry is hard. But this is one that everyone could see coming.
