The European Commission (EC) initiated a new reform of the
Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) via a Green Paper (European
Commission, 2009) and the approval of the proposal relating to
the CFP (COM (2011) 425, 13 July 2011); and the European Parliament
(EP) adopted the CFP reform in February 2013. The new
policy, which came into effect in 2014, follows the trend of its
predecessors, placing greater emphasis on the environmental
aspect, its main objective being to ensure a level of marine resource
exploitation that makes it possible to maintain fish populations
above the corresponding maximum sustainable yield in the year
2020. Perhaps the most important of the measures adopted in order
to achieve this objective is the establishment of market instruments
(either with regard to quotas or fishing effort). The EC
already included this measure in the previous proposal (COM
(2001) 135, 20 March 2001); however fishermen from several
countries, mainly from France and Spain, were opposed to their
implementation and the EP removed this possibility from the final
reform in 2002. This mechanism has been introduced in other
countries, such as New Zealand and Iceland, where it has been