US will spend up to $1bn to combat bird flu, agriculture secretary says

The US will invest up to $1bn (R18.5bn) to combat the spread of bird flu, and increase imports of eggs in an effort to drive down high prices, agriculture secretary Brooke Rollins said on Wednesday.

A three-year bird flu outbreak in US poultry has killed 166-million chickens since 2022, according to agriculture department data.

The virus has also infected nearly 1,000 dairy herds and almost 70 people, including one who died, since early 2024.

The department will spend up to $500m (R9.2bn) to provide free biosecurity audits to farms and $400m (R7.4bn) to increase payment rates to farmers who need to kill their chickens due to bird flu, Rollins said at a conference of state agriculture officials.

In a Wall Street Journal column on Wednesday, Rollins said some of the money will come from cuts to department spending by Elon Musk's department of government efficiency. However, on a call with reporters later in the day, Rollins' chief of staff, Kailee Tkacz Buller, said the money was coming from the department's Commodity Credit Corporation, a discretionary pool of funding available to the secretary.

The agency did not immediately clarify the discrepancy.

The department is exploring vaccines for chickens but is not yet authorising their use, Rollins said. The poultry industry is divided on whether to vaccinate chickens because of potential trade implications.

“It could be a solution, but to push that out and require it, we're not ready,” Rollins said about vaccines when speaking to reporters at the White House on Wednesday.

Some industry groups expressed relief on a Wednesday call with Rollins that the agency did not move to require vaccines, said Rick Phillips, director of poultry professional services veterinarians for drugmaker Boehringer Ingelheim, who was on the call.

“There was a bit of a sigh that they didn't move fast on certain things, like immediately going to vaccination, until we better understand the nature of what we're dealing with,” he said.

The company received a US licence in 2023 for a bird flu vaccine for chickens.

The administration plans to increase imports and decrease exports of eggs to boost domestic supply and combat record high egg prices, Rollins said. Turkey has said it will export 15,000 tonnes of eggs to the US through to July.

This year, Turkey is expected to supply about 420-million eggs to the US, up from about 70-million normally, Buller said on the press call.

Egg prices have nearly doubled since last year. Scant supply is leading some consumers to “panic buy”,  Virginia Tech economist Jadrian Wooten said in an email.

In May last year the administration of former president Joe Biden allocated more than $800m (R14.7bn) to combat bird flu in livestock. About $450m (R8.3bn) of that money is  available, a department official said on Tuesday at the National Association of State Departments of Agriculture conference.

Reuters