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moeburn t1_j5g0hs4 wrote

Reply to comment by The_Drizzle_Returns in US investigating baby formula plant after national shortage by nosotros_road_sodium

Yes like eggs. We don't have the increased prices in Canada because we have supply management for eggs.

That's where we compel all egg producers to make X amount of eggs, whether people actually want to buy them or not. And if people don't buy them, the government buys them instead.

So all the egg producers are always producing the same number of eggs regardless of demand, and they're always making the same amount of money.

End result is we were paying slightly more than you guys during times of plenty, and now we're paying way way less than you guys ($2 CAD/doz here in Ontario) during times of scarcity.

Your government was about to do that with baby formula, and then voted against it.

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[deleted] t1_j5g6tbo wrote

[deleted]

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Eurocorp t1_j5grcde wrote

Yeah like the US buys a ton of milk products to help the price of milk keep stable because of the dairy subsides.

All the subsidies of an industry mean little if the cows or chickens start falling sick.

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moeburn t1_j5gfecc wrote

No but when they were always producing 20% more than Canadians ever bought, and the avian flu problem results in a loss of 19% of your eggs, you still have a surplus, and prices don't change. That's the point. The government says "please make all this extra food every year, don't worry we will pay for it if nobody wants it. We just want it to be available in case there's a shortage one year."

The American government instead says "here's $100,000, please make food with it". And you hope that they vote to increase or decreases that amount as farmers need it.

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PMmeserenity t1_j5hazsk wrote

Good thing climate change isn’t an issue in Canada! No reason not to be extremely wasteful with industrial production...

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moeburn t1_j5hbd8m wrote

> to be extremely wasteful

It's actually less wasteful this way. Your American farmers are still dumping all their excess milk when they can't sell it, they just don't have any government intervention to protect them when it all goes tits up, so they either produce even more to try and make more money (which gets dumped), or they go bankrupt and get bought up and consolidated by billionaires.

>Farmers with perishable products such as milk were at the mercy of processors who knew they could pressure farmers into accepting lower prices because the alternative was a spoiled product worth nothing. If individual farmers each tried to compensate for low prices by producing more, the result was a market glut which further depressed prices. Often the solution was to dump the excess milk, wasting it. Processors could threaten to refuse delivery and lower prices by encouraging competition among producers, allowing the price to be set by the most desperate farmer. Consumers were subject to price volatility, erratic supplies and seasonal shortages. Furthermore, it was difficult to ensure consistent quality when farmers could not rely on a fair return for their efforts and investment.

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PMmeserenity t1_j5hcbzb wrote

So it seems like your whole story is just full of shit. Canada’s laws haven’t helped it avoid egg price fluctuations, Canada had just been lucky enough to avoid significant bird flu before 2022 but that’s changing. So let’s see how price controls do going forward, now that you’re actually dealing with the issue.

Also, I don’t know know where you live in Canada, but it seems like most of the country has seen steep egg price increases this last year. You might find them for 2/dozen, but in Toronto the average price is $4.45. Kinda seems like you’re just making shit up?

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moeburn t1_j5hii68 wrote

> Canada’s laws haven’t helped it avoid egg price fluctuations,

That's exactly what they do.

>Canada had just been lucky enough to avoid significant bird flu before 2022

Right... the bird flu epidemic causing steep increase in egg prices in US and UK and elsewhere was in 2022. Hence the prices today, in 2023. We were all affected by it, but your country is seeing more expensive price increases because of it than mine because of a different policy.

>in Toronto the average price is $4.45.

I don't know where you got that number, but that's okay, because I got my own numbers, and they're both in the same currency, $USD:

https://i.imgur.com/arliV75.png (https://www.expatistan.com/price/eggs/toronto/USD)

https://i.imgur.com/5W0sJt0.png (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/APU0000708111)

So people in Toronto are paying 3/4 what people in major US cities are paying for a dozen eggs.

Especially weird considering almost everything is almost always more expensive in Canada due to our smaller population and lack of economies of scale.

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PMmeserenity t1_j5hl8yr wrote

> I don't know where you got that number

It's in the article I linked.

And even if what you say is true, I'd rather not pay extra for eggs all the time to avoid rare price spikes. There's plenty of other foods to eat, and no reason to tolerate constant inefficiency (both carbon footprint and cost) in order to make sure prices don't fluctuate. It's not like those controls will help you avoid inflation overall, just occasional spikes. If my whole grocery bill is smaller in the US, why does it matter that eggs cost more sometimes?

And the reason everything is more expensive in Canada (and I agree, it is, at least where I travel for work) might have something to do with these price controls.

There's a lot of things about the US that deserve criticism, but food supply really isn't it. If there's anything we are good at, it's making a ton of commodity foods, cheap.

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PMmeserenity t1_j5hcrvg wrote

And the US government actually does buy a ton of milk and cheese, both to maintain prices and production capacity, and to create a national reserve. I think we’ve got about 1.5 billion pounds of cheese in storage.

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razorirr t1_j5h64e9 wrote

So the canadian government is paying piles of money to keep farmers making too much of a livestock product, when we all know livestock products are a huge waste of energy, land, water, and emit more GHG compared to just making plants and telling people to not have an ommlette every morning?

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moeburn t1_j5h8tjz wrote

>telling people to not have an ommlette every morning?

We do it with all dairy and poultry products. Basically every staple perishable calorie we produce en-masse in Canada has supply management.

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happy-cig t1_j5gfc8i wrote

You can say that because Canada doesn't even consume close to the amount of eggs the USA consumes.

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moeburn t1_j5gg8zi wrote

No because we're a smaller country with fewer people and fewer chickens :/

These arguments never make any sense. Compare Canada to any individual state with around 30 million people then, like California.

The point is the supply management system. It's this weird semi-socialism thing where the government tells the industry of some life-essential product to always make more than people will actually buy, they mandate production quotas on them. And then the government pays them for all the extra that they don't sell, so that it doesn't actually burden the producers and make the industry collapse. That way one bad year when there's an avian flu outbreak or a baby formula factory contamination, there's still enough surplus to make up the difference and the prices/availability don't change at all, because you made sure the industry was always making enough to cover it.

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happy-cig t1_j5idj28 wrote

Well its about scalability right?

Canada - population ~38mil, consumption ~38mil eggs

USA - population ~331mil, consumption ~339mil eggs

So with the Avian flu if we lose any percentage of our chickens then we get rekt, as shown by current times.

​

Also USA Egg production - 96.6 billion

vs

Canada 839 million

​

We are producing 11.5x times the eggs as Canada. while you are only 9x our population.

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neonlexicon t1_j5hjm9b wrote

Also doesn't help that big poultry farms have been pumping chickens full of hormones & screwing up their genetics to the point where their immune systems are practically nonexistent, allowing avian flu to just rip through them by the millions.

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