The EU will accelerate efforts to strike new trade deals with “like-minded partners” as the bloc tries to reduce its dependence on Russian energy and natural resources, the EU\u2019s trade chief said in an interview with the Financial Times.<\/p>\n

European Commission Executive Vice President Valdis Dombrovskis said the EU needs to \u201cbroaden its base\u201d of trading partners to become more \u201cresilient\u201d in areas like raw materials and commodities.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe can use our network of free trade agreements (FTAs) to face the current geopolitical challenges, to diversify away from Russia\u2019s supplies, to strengthen the resilience of supply chains,\u201d Dombrovskis told the FT<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf we want to reduce our dependence on raw materials from some providers, we need to broaden our base,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

The EU is hoping to strike a raft of new deals<\/a> including with Australia and Chile  \u2014 and recently reached an agreement<\/a> with New Zealand. But the Commission has also been struggling<\/a> to conclude and ratify deals, especially under the more reluctant French presidency of the Council, which wrapped up at the end of June.<\/p>\n

\u201cHaving a wide network of FTAs is a source of diversification and thus a source of resilience,\u201d Dombrovskis told the newspaper.   <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The EU will accelerate efforts to strike new trade deals with “like-minded partners” as the bloc tries to reduce its dependence on Russian energy and natural resources, the EU\u2019s trade chief said in an interview with the Financial Times. European Commission Executive Vice President Valdis Dombrovskis said the EU needs to \u201cbroaden its base\u201d of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[66],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4241","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/teachbytes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4241","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/teachbytes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/teachbytes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/teachbytes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/teachbytes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4241"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/teachbytes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4241\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4242,"href":"https:\/\/teachbytes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4241\/revisions\/4242"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/teachbytes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4241"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/teachbytes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4241"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/teachbytes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4241"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}