Eggs a quarter more expensive than a year ago

Eggs in the Netherlands, on average, cost 26.3 percent more in February than a year earlier. The price of eggs has risen sharply worldwide in recent months, Statistics Netherlands reported on Wednesday.

The historically high egg prices are due to a sharp increase in the cost of chicken feed and a smaller supply due to bird flu. Food prices as a whole also increased sharply, but less quickly than eggs at 18.4 percent.

In the European Union, eggs were, on average, 31 percent more expensive than in February last year. In the Czech Republic, egg prices almost doubled, rising by 95 percent. Hungarians and Slovakians pay nearly 80 percent more for their eggs, while prices in Cypris rose only 14 percent and 8 percent in Norway.

Last year, the Netherlands imported 536 million euros of eggs, mostly from other EU countries. €7 million in eggs came from Ukraine, accounting for 1.4 percent of Dutch egg imports. Before May 2022, the Netherlands imported virtually no eggs from the country.

The Netherlands exports far more eggs than it imports. In 2022, the country exported nearly 1.5 billion euros worth of eggs, almost 29 percent more than in 2021. “The fact that the export value increased so much is due to the historically high prices of eggs,” the stats office said. Nearly three-quarters went to other EU countries.