Will exporting become more attractive for egg producers?

Exporting eggs is more sustainable than shipping the grain to feed layers and there are plenty of markets hungry to boost their egg consumption.

Eggs from Malawi for sale in a market in Mozambique. (Vincent Guyonnet)
Eggs from Malawi for sale in a market in Mozambique. (Vincent Guyonnet)

Eggs are typically produced locally, close to where they are consumed, but could there be a much larger export market for eggs than is currently recognized?  

Global trade in shell eggs currently represents only 2.8% of world egg production, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization database. The figure is extremely low when compared, for example, to chicken meat (12.3%), and certainly to crops, such as coffee beans (78.5%), cocoa beans (73.4%), soybeans (46.6%) or even wheat (23.4%).    

In 2019, the vast majority of the shell egg trade happened within Europe (57.7%) and Asia (32.2%). In Europe, this trade involves mainly the Netherlands, Poland and Germany, with extremely fluid exchanges, with Germany and the Netherlands ranked both among the biggest exporters and the biggest importers of shell eggs.  

In Asia, the major trading routes are between Malaysia and Singapore and mainland China and Hong Kong, servicing densely populated islands with insufficient local production.  

When considering the net exports -- that is deducting imports from the volume of export -- the top five countries are Turkey, Poland, the U.S., Uzbekistan and Malaysia. Turkey, with net exports of 270,900 metric tonnes of shell eggs, accounts for about 12% of the global trade of shell eggs. 

Uzbekistan may not be a country that you would think about in terms of shell egg production, ranking 30th amongst the world’s producers behind Peru and just above Morocco.

However, egg production in the country more than doubled between 2010 and 2019, and almost 32% of its production is now exported. Poland exports 36.4% of its shell egg output, while Turkey exports 21.8%. In contrast, the USA, with net exports of 179,000 metric tons, exports only 2.7% of its production. 

Take advantage of geography?

COVID-19 may have initially disrupted global trade, but shipping eggs requires less capacity than importing grains to feed laying hens. 

More countries could now consider their strategic location as an opportunity to focus more on the export of shell eggs.  While global annual egg consumption is estimated at 180 eggs per person, the average consumption across the African continent, for example, is only 44 and per capita consumption in many Asian countries is still below 100.

We may see more countries adopting the of shell eggs exports as their new growth model, satisfying needs in regions such as Africa and Asia.

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