The European Union will make fighting the climate emergency central to its trade policy and push for major reform at the WTO, according to a new strategy revealed on Thursday. The new thinking on EU trade policy came with hopes in Brussels for deeper cooperation with the Biden Administration in the US after four years of fractious ties with the protectionist Donald Trump. The EU, a massive market of 450 million people, has struggled to meet its trade policy objectives in the face of US protectionism and other obstacles. A top official of the European Commission, which handles trade policy for the EU's 27 member states, announced the new strategy, which is intended to help set goals over the next 10 years. "The challenges we face require a new strategy for EU trade policy," EU Executive Vice President Valdis Dombrovskis, who leads the bloc's trade policy, said in a statement. "Trade policy must fully support the green and digital transformations of our economy and lead global efforts to reform the WTO," he said. In its new vision, the Commission proposed that future trade deals embrace the 2015 Paris climate change agreement, whose absence from previous accords has been seen as a...
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