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I read the paper. But I believe that it is not so much the economic crisis that will set price trends in the future as much as the ecological. In contrast to the rest of the world - population density is the lowest in the US and unless one factors in ecological externalities - US prices can remain competitive for long. However - I find it strange that the USDA paper does not mention existing subsidies once while discussing US prices?

And what about the ecology and the proposed cap & trade. No mention of that in the paper despite the fact that the USDA is fighting it based on "prices"? The UN reckons that dairy cows alone are responsible for almost 1/5th of greenhouse gases - more than all cars, trucks and planes combined. A recent paper published by the WorldWatch Institute claims similar results:

By contrast, Weber and Matthews found, agricultural production accounts for the bulk of the food system's greenhouse gas emissions: 83 percent of emissions occur before food even leaves the farm gate.... In her study, transport accounted for about a tenth of the food system's greenhouse gas emissions, and agricultural production accounted for half.

The other clear result that emerges from these analyses is that what you eat matters at least as much as how far it travels, and agriculture's overwhelming "hotspots" are red meat and dairy production. In part that's due to the inefficiency of eating higher up on the food chain-it takes more energy, and generates more emissions, to grow grain, feed it to cows, and produce meat or dairy products for human consumption, than to feed grain to humans directly. But a large portion of emissions associated with meat and dairy production take the form of methane and nitrous oxide, greenhouse gases that are respectively 23 and 296 times as potent as carbon dioxide. ..

"No matter how it is measured, on average red meat is more GHG-intensive than all other forms of food," responsible for about 150 percent more emissions than chicken or fish. In their study the second-largest contributor to emissions was the dairy industry. Nor are these two studies unique in their findings.

So what about that? A lot of our feed also comes from Brazil and other countries? And if other countries destroyed their ecologies because of mimicking Western consumption - what about that?

I agree with the author of this post that we carry responsibility - but not for others - for ourselves. It is in our self-interest to change our current practices asap. The USDA cannot hope that the following will really happen or continue- do they?

Some huge livestock farms produce more raw waste than cities as large as Philadelphia or Houston. But federal regulators are failing to control pollution from the gigantic operations or assess health risks from the enormous quantities of manure they produce, according to congressional investigators. ... The conclusions fueled concerns about a proposed Environmental Protection Agency rule change that would eliminate one of the few federal oversight mechanisms over air and water pollution from big farms.

Well - at least the EPA has had some change of heart and has now proposed a CO2 tax on livestock. What happened - the USDA which receives dozens of billions of tax subsidies per year - complains about a few millions to lower CO2 (from the first link above):

“If GHG emissions from agricultural sources are regulated under the CAA, numerous farming operations that currently are not subject to the costly and time-consuming Title V permitting process would, for the first time, become covered entities. Even very small agricultural operations would meet a 100-tons-per-year emissions threshold. For example, dairy facilities with over 25 cows, beef cattle operations of over 50 cattle, swine operations with over 200 hogs, and farms with over 500 acres of corn may need to get a Title V permit. It is neither efficient nor practical to require permitting and reporting of GHG emissions from farms of this size. Excluding only the 200,000 largest commercial farms, our agricultural landscape is comprised of 1.9 million farms with an average value of production of $25,589 on 271 acres. These operations simply could not bear the regulatory compliance costs that would be involved.”

Really - what is going on? Has there ever been a stranger, more sinister industry?