Soaring egg prices leave household food budgets scrambling

Even as households struggle with their kitchen budgets, unabated inflation in poultry farm input costs is making the prices of eggs and poultry meat even costlier.  In Kolkata, egg prices have soared back to ₹7 apiece after easing to about ₹6 recently. Broiler chicken prices too have moved higher by ₹20-25 per kg since last week, media reports said, quoting retailers in the city.

The GST Council, at its June 28-29 meeting, hiked the rates for machines for cleaning, sorting or grading eggs, fruit or other agricultural produce and its parts, milking machines and dairy machinery, from 12 per cent to 18 per cent. This is expected to further push up egg prices and, hence, food inflation.

In Namakkal, the poulty hub of Tamil Nadu, eggs have become expensive because of the rise in fodder prices. Poultry farmers say that over the past year, production costs have gone up by roughly 30 per cent, which has made their business unsustainable.

Feed, medicine prices

“Chicken feed prices continue to rise higher. Our total cost jump is nearly 90 per cent. Feed and medicine prices are already up 80 per cent while fuel cost adds about 8.5 per cent of our total cost. Egg price below ₹7 a piece is unremunerative for farmers,” West Bengal Poultry Federation Secretary Madan Mohan Maity told PTI.

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Anmol Feeds MD Amit Saraogi too said there had been a sharp elevation in feed price due to an unprecedented jump in the cost of oil cake and other feed-making inputs. “I think the high feed cost is playing a key role in soaring prices of poultry products,” he said.

Little in price rise for the producers

Justifying the rise in prices of eggs, Vangli Subramanian, President of Tamil Nadu Egg Poultry Farmers Marketing Society, said that before COVID stuck, 1 kg of fodder would cost anything between ₹18 and ₹20 and now they are spending ₹30-32 per kg.

A poultry farmer said that consumers might think eggs have become too expensive and that poultry owners are making big money. “This price rise is only helping us meet our expenses. To produce a single egg we invest approximately ₹4.80 to ₹5.10. If we include other costs like labour, transportation, vaccination and electricity, we barely break even,” the farmer said.

Maity denied that there were any supply constraints of eggs in the market. Daily national production remains normal at 25-27 crore eggs per day, he added.

Asked whether prices could rise further, Maity said, the association was trying to ensure that retail prices do not move more than ₹ 7 per piece to protect common people’s interest.

India’s inflation remained at over 7 per cent in May, higher than the desired band of 4-6 per cent.