Higher Meat Prices in the Future?

That's the message I took away from a John Phipps post, as he quoted from a Purdue professor:

So when does the boom in pork and hog prices come? Based on projections of U.S. slaughter supplies, prices will improve very late this fall and winter and go wildly higher by next spring and summer. When one adds the trade boom, this advances the price escalation. Trade data lags about two months so we are always slow to see those impacts. Trade will likely continue to accelerate and this will encourage even stronger prices than the supply reductions expected for late this year and 2009.

The movement upward has begun for cattle, where prices have been up nearly $10 per hundredweight in the last three weeks. Given the coming declines in pork supply and the more than vigorous export growth, hog prices should not be far behind. If U.S. consumers don’t want to buy up the last of the cheap pork, the world is anxious for the opportunity.

John is skeptical--livestock producers are currently taking it in the neck, apparently.