Eggs in Poland paying for the 550+

I just bought some eggs and the shop owner dutifully answered my query as to price of same, by stating that the startling increase in the price of eggs is controlled by the marketing board (which obviously is some institute..).

She is adamant that the price is not due to the recent chicken scandal, but by the government fixing prices of essential foodstuffs to pay for 500 +. Is there any truth to this? One scandal followed by another?

Nothing to do with PiS -there have been some scandals in Netherlands about chemicals used in battery farming and it has caused a big shortage and a price increase everywhere. I think the price in Germany has almost doubled so Polish eggs are being exported there.

The price of eggs in Poland also almost doubled - depending on the shop. The same applies to butter.
I don't know if that's connected with 500+ but it's annoying as wages aren't going up - unlike the prices.
It has happened before and eventually they had to lower the prices as people cut down on shopping certain items.

The government will only have minuscule additional profits from higher egg prices since VAT for eggs is just 5% and producers are private companies. And there is no central price fixing in the first place. Which would be impossible to pull off inside the common EU market anyway.

What is actually happening is that prices across Europe are rising fast- here a chart from Germany:
welt.de/wirtschaft/article170168740/Europa-gehen-die-Eier-aus.html#cs-DWO-WI-Eierpreis-pd-jpg.jpg
It is said that some 6 million chicken were killed in 2017 and that now some 20 million are missing from the market.

With butter, it seems to be a combination of a change in local consumer habits (increased demand), a drop in production in the EU, and an increased demand for Milk overseas, in particular in China:

money.cnn.com/2017/08/09/news/economy/butter-shortage-europe/index.html
While eggs cannot be shipped that easily over long distances, dried milk powder can.

The article also talks about unintended consequences from the 2014 russian sanctions. The immediate effect was an oversupply of dairy products in Europa, which was followed by a voluntary cut in production capacities by a lot of farms going of of business in 2015 and 2016. For this reason, butter production in 2017 is down some 5% in the EU.

@jgrabner

you are a voice of reason in this widespread histeria around

UK butter prices rose at least 50%, over supply resulted in many farmers pulling out of the UK market. Purely a UK situation, but with other actions around the EU, end result is prices rise everywhere.

I read somewhere that demand for butter rose in the US more than 5 per cent recently and was prognosed to rise by 8 per cent in 2017 - add to it the growth in demand for butter in China and you have the reasons of worldwide butter prices' hikes


it's definitely not purely a UK situation

Dairy overproduction has long been a severe problem in just about every developed country for decades. The US is engaged in a bitter dairy war with Canada at the moment, as is Russia is with Belarus. The dairy war in Europe has been going on since the early 1970s, and is a constant source of tension, involving countries as far away as New Zealand.