The European Union Fisheries Commission’s pilot project to help clean up the ocean by paying fishermen to catch garbage instead of fish could be a good way to keep fishermen employed and help remove marine litter.

Catching Cans Instead Of Cod

Katharine Gammon
Fast Company – Co.Exist

In the French Rivieria, it’s not uncommon to see a mustached fisherman hauling up his nets at the end of the day. The uncommon part would come in seeing what he’s catching: cans, bags, and plastic trash from the sea.

Last year, the European Union Fisheries Commission performed a pilot project to pay fishermen to ignore the fish and catch the garbage that’s clogging up international waters in the Mediterranean. The fishermen were provided with special nets to capture the debris, and they were paid for their time to trawl. Economists say that the scheme makes economic sense–a recent study showed that nearly 30% of the global fishing industry’s $80 billion annual revenue comes from government subsidies. There are many factors that have contributed to a rise in marine litter: poor waste management practices in ports and marinas, dumping by ships and vessels, and general public attitudes towards littering.

The program was a success and will be followed by other pilot projects in Belgium, Spain, Germany, Greece, and Austria, says Lone Mikkelsen at the Maritime Affairs and Fisheries Office at the European Commission in Belgium. “The Commission’s proposal for a new European Maritime and Fisheries Fund does include fishing for litter as a possible activity that could be financed,” she says. The projects will be discussed by the European Parliament and a decision to fund more projects will come later this year. Eventually, they hope the project could become self-sustaining as fishermen get money from recycling the litter they find.

Other efforts to get the fishing community involved in ocean-borne cleanups are ramping up. A voluntary effort is headed by KIMO International. After pilot projects in the Netherlands and the North Sea, the organization is working in Scotland. Over 170 boats and 17 harbors now participate in the voluntary Scottish initiative.

20,000 tons of litter is dumped each year into the North Sea, KIMO reports, and of that, 70% ends up on the seabed, while 15% floats on the surface and 15% washes up on beaches. Plastic bags are the worst offender. They break down into tiny pieces and poison fish, birds, and wildlife, causing the death of 100,000 marine mammals and 1,000,000 birds worldwide each year. KIMO says that the trash isn’t just hurting wildlife, it’s also hurting the bottom line of those who work in the fishing industry, to the tune of $50,000 per boat each year through contamination of catches, broken gear, and fouled propellers. Currently only the proportion that washes ashore is targeted by cleanup and awareness campaigns. These fishermen are going for the deep stuff–and making an impact. So far, they are hauling up 100 tons of litter per year.

Read the complete article at Fast Company – HERE

Getting dirty pays. At least if the dirt in question is actually oil. While there has been a lot of buzz about oil companies raking in huge profits, clearly they aren’t keeping all the money to themselves. Some of that green is being spread among the roughnecks that are doing the actual drilling. Yes, this is a dangerous profession but you are amply rewarded for the risk. Have you got what it takes to dig deep and drill? If so, you might just find plenty of opportunity. Here’s a hint: right now there are more oil rigs operating in the US than there are in the rest of the world combined. That’s a lot of big paychecks.

OIL RIG WORKERS MAKE NEARLY $100,000 A YEAR

By Steve Hargreaves NEW YORK (CNNMoney) –

It may be dangerous, difficult work, but oil drillers are well compensated for the job: In 2011 the average salary for rig workers and other industry personnel was $99,175. That number includes fat paychecks for the highly skilled, like $235,586 for a “drilling consultant” and $139,868 for a “reservoir engineer”, according to Rigzone, an industry information provider that compiled the figures. But even for someone with less than a year’s experience the average wage was $66,923.

A roustabout, one of the lowest workers on a rig who performs general maintenance and physical labor and requires little prior training, made $34,680 — the median wage for all American workers. The high wages are being fueled by a surge in demand for drilling experts as the industry becomes increasingly technical and a drilling boom in the United States, Brazil and elsewhere. Plus, many drillers are retiring — a phenomenon in the industry known as “the great crew change” that’s only expected to accelerate over the next decade.

America’s oil boom – at a cost

“They are desperate,” said Michael Durney, an executive at Dice Holdings, Rigzone’s parent company. “The industry is starting to look outside its core to fill these positions.”
And where are they looking? Just about anywhere.

Durney said for those with few skills that want a shot on a rig, one strategy is to move to any number of states that are currently seeing a boom in oil and gas production and get a job in logistics — driving a truck that brings supplies to the rig. Truck driving can pay $20 an hour or more, and from there it’s easy to meet people on the rigs. With a little planning it’s even easier to get a job on a rig right away. Several trade schools offer classes in oil field work, and the military offers training for those exiting the armed forces which could lead directly to work as a roustabout on a rig.

Once you’re on a rig, the companies themselves generally provide in-depth training programs where roustabouts can move up fairy quickly. “Rotary drill operators” make $58,540, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, while a rig foreman makes $193,306, according to Rigzone.

For the college-bound, petroleum engineering, geology, or just plain engineering are good areas of study that can lead to lucrative rig work.

A “mud engineer” averages $108,032 a year, according to Rigzone, while a subsea engineer makes $133,453. Demand for college educated rig workers is on the rise. At Houston’s Rice University, job postings for the oil and gas industry were up 14% from the year before.

“This year we had a career fair, and we literally had to tell companies they couldn’t attend,” said Nicole Van Den Heuvel, director at the university’s career center. “We didn’t have enough room.”
Van Den Heuvel offers familiar advice for college students seeking work in the oil industry: Apply for internships, utilize the university’s career center, and network online at places like LinkedIn or in person at industry trade shows.

Read more from CNN Money.

Everybody has an idea about how to plug up the Grand Canyon size holes in our economy. And for every idea, there is a counter argument which proves why that idea won’t work. There have been some recent big proposals about closing tax loopholes which only would result in 47 billion in savings. To this the counter argument was, “47 billion? That’s nothing.” In this never ending cycle of point and counterpoint nothing ever gets done. Which is why the idea detailed below is interesting because it takes on two problems for the price of one: Immigration and revenue. The idea is for companies to bid on guest worker visas for immigrant workers which allow them to do all the work they normally do but have been stopped from doing because we have no immigration laws. Is this a problem? Ask the hundreds of farmers that have produce rotting on the vine because nobody is there to pick it. This is worth considering.

IMMIGRATION PERMIT AUCTION TOUTED AS REFORM THAT WOULD AID ECONOMY

By Matt O’Brien

America’s decades-old immigration system should be replaced with an auction of work permits, says a UC Davis economist who is attracting attention on Capitol Hill. His market-based reform, which was unveiled Tuesday, would have U.S. companies compete in a quarterly electronic auction to buy permits to hire foreign workers. In essence, U.S. firms’ willingness to pay for work-based visas would become more important than family connections and fixed quotas in determining who gets to move to the United States.

“This would be quite a new system,” said Giovanni Peri, a professor who studies labor economics, explaining how it would replace today’s first-come, first-served waiting list and random lottery that dictate who gets work visas.

Each auctioned permit would be tied to a temporary visa. Visa-holders would be free to move from one job to another, making it harder for hiring companies to exploit them. Those who remain employed could later apply for permanent residency.

Work permit bids would start at a minimum $7,000 for high-skilled workers and $1,000 for lower-skilled seasonal jobs. Higher demand for workers could push employers’ bid prices higher, compelling Congress to make more visas available.

Revenue from the auction would be channeled to the federal government and to state and local agencies that provide public education and other services to immigrant families.
“Giovanni has a very ambitious proposal that would fundamentally reshape the immigration system,” said Michael Greenstone, director of The Hamilton Project and an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Greenstone’s group commissioned Peri to create the three-phase immigration overhaul. The project is affiliated with the Brookings Institution, a nonpartisan think tank, and named after Alexander Hamilton, the nation’s first secretary of the Treasury.

“All it’s doing is taking this very opaque, lawyer-heavy approach to who gets employment visas and (replacing it with) a very transparent approach,” Greenstone said.

Gone would be the long and arbitrary waits that for some would-be immigrants can last a decade. The auction would also make inviting a foreign worker more costly to employers than hiring an available local worker, undercutting concerns that low-paid immigrants are taking American jobs. A leading advocate for reducing immigration levels said he was “open to the idea of auctions” as a fairer immigration path than the current bureaucracy, but he worried Peri’s plan placed too few limits on businesses.

“The question is, is this just a vehicle for more employment-based immigration? That’s something that is clearly a mistake,” said Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies.

“What they seem to be trying to do is sneak in big increases in immigration under the cover of making the process more efficient and streamlining.”

The new approach is informed by Peri’s economic research, which has found that immigration rarely hurts and often helps native-born workers in the United States by raising overall productivity.

“Immigration creates a large economic surplus for the American economy,” Peri said. “Immigrants move from their country and become much more productive in the U.S., generating more income and wealth.”

Peri puts his plan into a divisive national debate over illegal immigration and job competition that many economists believe is divorced from economic realities. Shifting to a labor-driven system would make the need for immigrants more apparent, he said.

“It would certainly generate more awareness and clarity on the economic value of immigrants and immigration,” Peri said.

After a pilot program for temporary work visas, Peri would expand the auction model to most of the immigration system and restrict family-based immigration to immediate relatives. That would shift American immigration away from the family focus that has guided policy since 1965. However, Peri believes the expansion of auctioned work permits would open doors for many Latin American immigrants for whom extended family connections is the only legal immigration option today.

Peri said his funders wanted him to create a proposal that “had a real chance of being implemented, accounting for the possible roadblocks and criticisms.” No country has tried such an auction before, he said. Canada and Australia have a points-based system that favors high-skilled immigrants, but the government, not the labor market, determines the rankings.

Read more from the Mercury News.

Secretaries of Agriculture — 30 Leaders; 150 Years; looks at the history of USDA from the viewpoints of its nine most recent Secretaries. Each shares reflections on his or her time at USDA and then presents ideas about future challenges for USDA and American agriculture. This 16 minute film explores the rich history and prominent role of USDA in American life; and why it continues to be known by the name given it by its founder; Abraham Lincoln: The Peoples Department.

Visit the United States Department of Agriculture website HERE to learn more.

Click here to watch the video.

This series

Special Report: Farmer of the Future

This we know: You can’t feed the growing world population without farmers. But there are serious questions today about who will actually be able to take on the job a few decades from now. Farmers are getting older, yes, but technological, cultural and political forces also are bringing immense change to those people who commit to building their lives around the land.

Read the stories and watch the videos – HERE

The NASDA’s mission is to represent the state departments of agriculture in the development, implementation, and communication of sound public policy and programs which support and promote the American agricultural industry, while protecting consumers and the environment.

Visit their website – HERE

Learn more – HERE

Put aside for the moment my snarky headline: The real story is that China is adding to it’s employment roles to the tune of millions and millions of well trained workers. For some time, China has poured about 12% of its GDP (which is mega) back into education, healthcare and training. The result is an enviable workforce ready to take on the challenges the nation will face in the coming years. This is not a recommendation for their form of government; far from it. But it’s a lesson to be learned about priorities with regard to the labor force. If a country is serious about developing effective skilled workers they will.

CHINA TO ENLARGE TALENT POOL TO 180M

By Chen Xin (China Daily)

China is witnessing an increase in better-educated laborers and a booming talent pool, official figures show. The country was home to 120 million managerial, professional and skilled workers at the end of 2010, up by 7.8 million from 2008. They accounted for 11.1 percent of the country’s labor force, according to statistics released on Monday.
Among the talent pool are nearly 30 million business management personnel, 55.5 million technical professionals, 28.6 million highly skilled personnel and around 10.5 million rural staff with practical skills. The investment in human capital was equivalent to 12 percent of GDP in 2010.

Such investment includes spending in education, health, and research and development, according to the latest figures. One-eighth of the working-age population has received higher education, up from less than one in 10 in 2008. China plans to enlarge its talent pool to 180 million by 2020, which would account for 16 percent of the labor force, according to the country’s talent development plan for 2010-2020.

The plan also forecasts that one-fifth of its population of working age would have received higher education by that time. Liu Xin, a professor at the institute of organization and human resources under Renmin University of China, said the increases show that the country is shifting its focus from an investment-led growth model to one led by skills and education.

Liu said China’s fast development in the past three decades was based on massive investment but was actually driven by inexpensive labor.

“The government has realized that it’s wiser to adjust the development model and sustain growth through creating and using talent. It’s in line with the country’s goal of building an innovative country,” he said.

Liu said China has the largest number of scientific research staff in the world but still lags behind many countries in its ability to innovate and invent. He suggested that talented researchers and developers in the private sector should be given a bigger role to help innovation.

In many other countries, not all key innovations are made by government think tanks, as the private sector plays an important role in this regard, he said.

“China should create a more favorable environment for talent to grow and function, rather than simply rely on imported technologies,” he said.

Read more about China’s labor force at China Daily.

As any new mom or dad will tell you, a large portion of their “evolved” daily routine involves feeding the kidlets. First there is the attempt to make sure they are eating right by providing them with all the nutritious benefits of a well-balanced meal. If a child should ever conceive of other options like Captain Crunch for breakfast, then all your hard work steaming broccoli goes out the window. Then the battle lines are drawn between “clean your plate” versus “I’m not eating that.” Who surrenders first can alter the entire family dynamic. And that’s just for dinner. Perhaps another approach can be found in finding a way to get your kids connected to their food early on. Over in Connecticut there are several local family farms who are doing just that through a series of farm camp summer programs. Quite frankly, I’d like to sign up for farm camp!

INTRODUCING CHILDREN TO THE SOURCES OF FOOD

By Jan Ellen Spiegel writing for the NY Times

IN the waning days of last summer, Brie Casadei stood at the edge of several raised garden beds and pointed. “This huge plant, anyone know what it is?” she asked a dozen or so elementary-school-aged children around her.

Dead silence.

“That’s the basil,” she said, answering herself. “That’s what we’re going to use to make our pesto.”

That didn’t exactly clear things up; both the basil and pesto were new to nearly every child within earshot of Ms. Casadei on that buggy August morning. No surprise, perhaps, in an age in which computer-game-centric children think milk, eggs and potatoes come from a store. It is also why, in 2005, Ms. Casadei and her husband, Ethan Grimes, started their farm camp, Terra Firma.

“We had five kids,” Ms. Casadei said of their first two-week trial camp.

Now with the winds of the local food movement, food safety concerns, out-of-control obesity and outcry over things like “pink slime” at its back, Terra Firma has several hundred summer campers, ages 3 through 12, many coming for multiple weeks across a nine-week summer season. Such popularity adds to the evidence that interest is growing in farm camps in Connecticut. There are about half a dozen such camps, up from just a couple that languished for years before the recent spike in interest.

With prices that can reach $300 for a week, camps are filling up and waiting lists are expanding. The reasons parents send their children vary, but Ms. Casadei, like other camp directors, said it was obvious how removed children were from what they eat.

“They don’t know peas are in pea pods, or that this warm egg they just picked up is the same one they’re going to eat,” she said recalling one family that only knew meat as white, pink or red, not where it came from. “We do asparagus to zucchini and everything in between.”

Camps typically have themed weeks to coincide with farm needs. At Terra Firma “roots, shoots and muddy boots” is planting week; basil-and-pesto day comes during a “farm-to-pizza” week that showcases all the farm components of pizza and involves campers in all aspects of preparation, from basil picking (“We don’t want to be like crazy lawn mowers when we go through to get this; we want to be delicate,” Ms. Casadei admonished) to cheese preparation and tomato harvesting.

“I learned that pizza is one of everything,” said Andersen Steele, 8, during her second week of camp last year. “It has dairy, it has grain, it has vegetables and it has a little bit of oil on it and it has meat if it’s pepperoni.”

Her mother, Beth Steele, recalled her daughter’s pizza fascination and her overall increased interest in what her family eats since she attended farm camp. “She has a better appreciation when we go to the grocery store of what it takes to get that food from the farm to the store to your table,” she said.

But equally important, Ms. Steele said, was what was missing from the children’s days at camp: “No TV, no computer. You’re outdoors with nature.”And at Terra Firma that means the children are doing things like feeding the mud-sloshing pigs and, on this particular day, learning the unforgettable lesson of what a rotten egg smells like. (“Oh my God, that smells disgusting!”)

Then there are the more palatable lessons. “We learned about squash, gourds, watermelon,” said Rhys Hammond, who was 9 at camp last year. “I knew the black seeds were seeds, but I didn’t know there were white seeds. I just learned about lemon mint.”

His favorite? “Probably the cows.”

The 4-H Education Center at Auerfarm in Bloomfield is on 120 acres of what was once an early 20th-century family farm. The center has been in operation since the mid-1970s, but it added the summer program in the early 2000s. It has eight weeklong sessions, each with three age groups, with content designed to dovetail with the state’s science curriculum.
Auerfarm is benefiting from greater parental interest in food, said Pat Estill, a member of the farm’s board of directors. “It used to be, ‘That’s a nice thing for child to know.’ Now it’s ‘Children need to know this,’ ” she said. “Instead of ‘Eew, a bug,’ now it’s ‘There’s a bug; is this a good bug or a bad bug?’ ”

“Parents are interested in having their kids see food production close-up,” said Jack Hasegawa, the center’s executive director. “We had a boy last summer who came out really interested in gardening. At the end of the summer he was really happy because he knew enough so his father would allow him to help at home.”

The Summer Farm Camp at the Unquowa School is a six-year-old venture between the private school, in Fairfield, and Sport Hill Farm, in Easton. Open to the public, it runs for four weeks. Four mornings each week are spent on the farm helping the owner, Patti Popp, with whatever needs doing. “I tell Patti, ‘We’re your worker bees,’ ” said Mary Faulkner, the camp director, who said parents had started calling last October about this year’s camp enrollment. “Kids don’t care what they have to do. They’re outside with their hands in the dirt and they’re having fun.”

Bella Wild, then 10, was having fun last summer at Terra Firma as she dunked her umpteenth cherry tomato into a batch of pesto (light on the garlic, with a basil and parsley base) she had helped to prepare. “I don’t know,” she laughed when asked how many tomatoes in pesto she’d eaten.

Read more about these tasty programs at the New York Times.

I’m a big fan of the chart. If you can put a bunch of facts in a chart, I’m all over it. Also, a big fan of the pop-up book but that’s not always practically for conveying economic conditions. Below is a piece from the Atlantic delving into the topic of what jobs are fading fast and which ones are on the rise. It’s a fascinating read and offers a primer into what might be coming for our country down the road. The headline: fastest declining job: brick layers; fastest rising job: data processors. Interesting.

THE FASTEST-DYING JOBS OF THIS GENERATION (AND WHAT REPLACED THEM)

By Jordan Weisemann writer for The Atlantic

In the late twentieth century, America underwent its big switch — the transformation from a broadly middle class, manufacturing-based economy, to a financially polarized, services-based economy. Union rolls plummeted as Wall Streets profits surged, and the demand for factory workers were supplanted by the need for healthcare professionals, teachers, and computer engineers.

This is a narrative that, by now, is probably familiar to you. But it’s also abstract.

The two graphs below, adapted from a new working paper by University of Pennsylvania economist Jeremy Greenwood and the Census Bureau’s Emin Dinlersoz on the rise and fall of U.S. labor unions, tell the tale more concretely. They track the fastest-declining and fastest-growing occupations between 1983 and 2002. I’ve organized them by color. Occupations that were less than 20 percent unionized are in BLUE; between 20 and 40 percent unionized are in GREEN; and more than 40 percent unionized are in RED.

In roughly 20 years, entire categories of factory work nearly disappeared. If your job hinged on your aptitude with a shoe machine, it was in danger. Likewise if you worked a lathe every day for a living, or had a spot anywhere else on a classic production line, where dozens of hands handled simple, discreet tasks. (How sociologists ended up on this list, I’m frankly not sure.) These were jobs that, thanks to their heavy levels of unionization, paid a good middle class wage to employees without many skills. And when manufacturing technology improved, they became redundant.
Of the fastest-growing occupations, the winner, by a long shot, was numerical control machine operators — the men and women who program and run factory machinery. Specialized knowledge replaced a steady hand and strong back. But nearly all of the other fast-expanding job categories required even higher levels of education, and few had high union membership.

Improved technology isn’t the only explanation for America’s big switch away from an economy that favored a highly unionized, low-skill workforce. The late twentieth century saw the mass migration of manufacturing to Asia, which led to the disappearance of certain industries stateside and forced many factories to slim down and automate their operations to keep pace with their new international competition. But Greenwood and Dinlersoz add evidence to the argument that technology was indeed the leading factor. The pair compared sectors based on how fast the price of new equipment and software fell over their time frame, assessing 61 industries in all. When technology becomes cheaper, it’s a sign more companies are buying it, and that they should theoretically need more educated workers to operate it. Sure enough, in industries where the price of new software and equipment dropped more, skilled workers increased compared to unskilled labor, while union membership dwindled.

Yes it’s hard to read the charts but you can see them clear here.