U.S. customs officers are cracking down on egg smugglers.
With egg costs hovering within the U.S. over the past yr, extra Americans are crossing into Mexico to purchase the meals merchandise and making an attempt to sneak cartons of uncooked eggs alongside some areas of the southern border, together with California and Texas.
“We are seeing an increase in people attempting to cross eggs from Juarez to El Paso because they are significantly less expensive in Mexico than the U.S.,” U.S. Customs and Border Protection spokesman Roger Maier instructed CBS MoneyWatch. “This is also occurring with added frequency at other Southwest border locations.”
Jennifer De La O, a U.S. Customs and Border Protection discipline operations director in San Diego, mentioned in a tweet this week that her workplace “has recently noticed an increase in the number of eggs intercepted at our ports.” Failure to declare agricultural objects whereas coming into the U.S. can carry fines of as much as $10,000, she added.
Federal regulation prohibits vacationers from bringing sure agriculture merchandise — together with eggs, in addition to dwell chickens and turkeys — into the U.S. “because they may carry plant pests and foreign animal diseases,” in accordance to customs guidelines. Eggs from Mexico have been banned from coming into the U.S. since 2012, in accordance to the USDA. Cooked eggs are allowable beneath USDA tips.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection
The variety of incidents wherein uncooked eggs had been confiscated at U.S. borders jumped greater than 100% throughout the closing three months of 2022 in comparison with the identical interval a yr in the past, in accordance to Border Report, a web-based news website targeted on immigration points. The worth for a 30-count carton of eggs in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, is $3.40, in accordance with Border Report.
Egg costs within the U.S. have surged to a mean of $4.25 a dozen, up from roughly $1.79 a yr in the past, in accordance with information from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. The price of processed eggs — utilized in liquid or powdered type in manufactured merchandise together with salad dressing, cake combine and chips — has additionally risen.
Those worth will increase are being pushed by rising shopper demand together with a lower in home egg provides brought on by an avian flu epidemic that has devastated U.S. poultry flocks.
Nearly 58 million birds have been contaminated with the illness, whereas greater than 43 million egg-laying hens have been slaughtered, in accordance with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, making it the deadliest avian flu outbreak in American historical past. USDA officers are investigating what brought on the outbreak.
People coming into the U.S. should declare eggs on the border, Charles Payne, supervisory agriculture specialist at U.S. Customs in El Paso, Texas, instructed Border Report. A customs officer will nonetheless confiscate the eggs and have them destroyed, however will waive the penalty for the offender.
“We don’t want to issue the penalties, but occasionally we have to,” Payner instructed Border Report. “So if you declare what you’ve got, there won’t be an issue.”