The Common Fisheries Policy: A Difficult Compromise Between Relative Stability and the Discard Ban

Abstract

For over 30 years, the TACs (total allowable catches) have been distributed among the Member States of the European Union using a fixed allocation key, supposedly based on historic catches, known as the relative stability. In December 2013, Regulation (EU) No 1380/2013 of the European Parliament and the Council on the Common Fisheries Policy was adopted. This new regulation keeps relative stability as a criterion for allocating fishing opportunities among Member States and also introduces something new: a ban on discards, which are catches returned to the sea. Implementing the discard ban poses a major challenge for mixed fisheries, where more than one species is present. The aim of this paper is to examine this compromise between relative stability and the discard ban.