The European Commission on Wednesday unveiled a new strategy to ensure access to foreign markets, relying on closer cooperation with business sector and targeting non-tariff barriers in key trading partners.

"This renewed strategy focuses on coordinating and strengthening the work of the commission, member states and business where it really matters -- on the ground in our key markets," the European Union's Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson said.

The center-piece of the strategy is a new decentralized partnership between the European Commission, member states and business, including the establishment of EU Market Access Teams on the ground in countries outside the EU.

The teams, involving commission delegations, member states embassies and business organizations, will be responsible for information gathering in the local market, identifying trade barriers before they appear as an early warning system and tackling existing obstacles to trade.

Local expertise will make trade barriers easier to identify and tackle, the commission said, adding that it was in response to the fact the nature of trade barriers has been changing.

Modern trade barriers are more likely to be non-tariff and behind-the-border regulatory issues -- harder to identify and often complex to address, the commission said.

"Where we were once concerned primarily with border tariffs, new types of barriers are more complicated and typically behind the border," Mandelson said, citing unnecessary regulation, discriminative standards and poor protection of intellectual property rights as examples.

In order for better use of limited resources, the EU will under the new strategy set priority on certain target markets, especially those emerging economies, like China, India and Russia, and on certain sectors or issues such as intellectual property rights.

The market access will be sought through tougher focus on the enforcement of both global and bilateral trade rules, Mandelson said, adding institutional dispute settlement like litigation in the World Trade Organization could be the choice if dialogue and negotiation fail.

"There are several ways to secure market access. The most powerful is multilateral liberalization through the WTO. It is and will remain our top priority. There are also specific agreements in areas like public procurement and our bilateral trade negotiations," the EU trade chief said.

The new strategy, part of the commission's Global Europe trade policy framework, also calls for a more efficient and transparent service to EU business, including more systematic registration and follow-up of cases and an improved Market Access Database, an on- line service for EU exporters which incorporates information on market access conditions in around 100 countries.

The EU's largest business lobby, BusinessEurope, said it fully supported the review of the EU market access strategy as it must deliver results for European companies by facilitating market access in high-growth emerging companies.

"If European companies are excluded from emerging markets, Europe's economic future and competitiveness is compromised," Philippe de Buck, secretary general of BusinessEurope, said at a joint press conference with Mandelson.

It was the first shakeup in a decade of the EU market access strategy. The previous strategy, adopted in 1996, aimed at enforcing multilateral and bilateral trade deals and at opening third country markets.

Following a public consultation from November last year to Jan. 19, 2007, the European Commission produced the new strategy.

"European competitiveness is not just about our own openness. It is about making sure our partners match that openness," Mandelson said.