Canada-Colombia: 15 years of free trade

July 2026
ISBN  978-0-662-71094-3

Table of contents

• Executive summary
• Introduction
• Merchandise trade
• Services trade
• Intensive margin and extensive margin growth
• Preference margin growth
• Preference utilization
• Conclusion

Executive summary

The Canada-Colombia Free Trade Agreement (CCoFTA) entered into force on August 15, 2011, and has produced a significant expansion in bilateral commercial relations, with total merchandise trade growing from $1.6 billion in 2010 to $4.1 billion by 2025. However, Colombian merchandise exports to Canada grew faster than Canadian exports in the other direction. Canadian export growth was comparatively constrained by Colombia’s smaller market size, the weakening of Colombia’s purchasing power when commodity prices fell, and Colombia’s unilateral tariff reductions in the early 2010s, which removed import duties on over 3,000 tariff lines and structurally eroded Canada’s anticipated preferential advantage.^{Footnote 1}

• Canadian Merchandise Exports: Reached $1.4 billion in 2025, growing at a modest average rate of 2.8% per year. Exports are distributed across a broader mix of agri-food and industrial products, led by:
  • Wheat: $400 million (28.6% of total exports).
  • Potash: $162
  • Lentils: $121
• Canadian Merchandise Imports: Reached $2.7 billion in 2025, expanding at an average annual pace of 9.2%. Growth was heavily concentrated in primary commodities:
  • Gold (Doré & Bullion): Over 40% of total imports ($1.1 billion).
  • Unroasted Coffee: 27% of total imports ($745 million).
  • Bituminous Coal: $201
• Trade expanded across a broader range of products, not just existing Products barely traded before the agreement accounted for 31.8% of the growth in Canadian exports and the majority of import growth, despite representing only 10% of pre-agreement trade.
• Canadian exports grew fastest where the agreement provided the deepest tariff Products facing reductions of 5 percentage points or more grew at 6.0 to 6.9 percent annually, while products that already entered duty-free before the agreement contracted at 6.8 percent.^{Footnote 2}
• Bilateral services trade expanded from $220 million in 2010 to $1.2 billion in 2024. Canadian exports rose from $159 million to $656 million (10.6% annually), while imports grew faster, from $61 million to $542 million (16.9% annually).
• Travel Services: Reflecting an eightfold increase (from $63 million to $504 million), travel now accounts for over three-quarters of Canada’s total service exports to Colombia.
• Preference utilization rates reached 9 percent for Canadian exports and 72.8 percent for Canadian imports in 2024, generating $67.5 million in duty savings on exports and $14.0 million on imports. Agricultural products showed the highest utilization on both sides, at 98.4 percent for exports and 91.9 percent for imports.

Introduction

The Canada-Colombia Free Trade Agreement (CCoFTA) entered into force on August 15, 2011, establishing preferential market access between Canada and one of Latin America’s largest economies.^{Footnote 3} Colombia’s population of over 53 million and its position as the region’s fourth-largest economy offer Canadian exporters access to a sizable and growing consumer market. The CCoFTA complemented tariff liberalization across goods categories with provisions on investment protection, services market access, government procurement, and regulatory transparency. Since implementation, bilateral merchandise and services trade have grown substantially, and firms on both sides actively claim the agreement’s tariff preferences. This report examines the trajectory of bilateral merchandise and services trade, analyzes growth at the intensive and extensive margins, and measures the depth and utilization of tariff preferences.

Merchandise trade

Since the CCoFTA entered into force, merchandise trade between Canada and Colombia has grown substantially (Figure 1). Canadian exports to Colombia grew 65 percent between 2010 and 2025, from $848 million to $1.4 billion, representing a deceleration from 6.9 percent compound annual growth (CAGR) pre-agreement to 2.8 percent post-agreement. Canadian imports from Colombia rose from $717 million in 2010 to $2.7 billion in 2025, nearly four times their pre-agreement level, a modest acceleration from 8.0 percent CAGR in the decade before the agreement to 9.2 percent after implementation.

Figure 1: Canada-Colombia Bilateral Merchandise Trade (2000-2025)

Data: Global Trade Atlas.
Source: Global Affairs Canada, Office of the Chief Economist.

Note: All monetary values are in Canadian dollars (CAD). Bars represent the annual value of merchandise trade. Canadian exports are shown as positive values (above the axis), while Canadian imports are shown as negative values (below the axis) to illustrate the trade composition. Canadian exports are derived from Colombian import data (mirrored); Canadian imports are reported directly by Canada. The vertical dashed line indicates the implementation of the Canada-Colombia Free Trade Agreement (CCoFTA) on August 15, 2011.

Source: Global Affairs Canada, Office of the Chief Economist; based on calculations from the Global Trade Atlas database (accessed April 2026).

The ten largest product categories in each trade direction account for a substantial majority of total bilateral flows and show a clear asymmetry in trade composition (Table 1). Canadian exports to Colombia concentrate in agri-food products and agricultural inputs, led by wheat, lentils, potash, pork, canola oil, and barley, which together account for the majority of the top ten lines. Canadian imports from Colombia are equally concentrated but structurally distinct, heavily weighted toward a narrow set of primary commodities: gold and coffee alone account for nearly two-thirds of all Canadian imports, with gold doré and bullion collectively representing over 40 percent of the total.

Table 1: Top 10 Bilateral Traded Products: Canada and Colombia (2025)

Note: All monetary values are in millions of Canadian dollars. Products are classified at the HS 10-digit tariff line level and ranked by trade value within each direction. Share refers to the product’s share of total bilateral trade for the given direction.
Source: Global Affairs Canada, Office of the Chief Economist; based on calculations from the Global Trade Atlas database (accessed April 2026).

Services trade

Services trade grew faster than merchandise trade following the CCoFTA. Canadian services exports to Colombia rose from $159 million in 2010 to $656 million in 2024, a compound annual rate of 10.6 percent (Figure 2). Imports rose more steeply still, from $61 million to $542 million, a CAGR of 16.9 percent.

Figure 2: Canada–Colombia Bilateral Services Trade (2000-2024)

Data: Statistics Canada Table 36-10-0007-01.
Source: Global Affairs Canada, Office of the Chief Economist.

Note: All monetary values are in Canadian dollars (CAD). Bars represent the annual value of services trade. Canadian exports are shown as positive values (above the axis), while Canadian imports are shown as negative values (below the axis) to illustrate the trade composition. Data represents direct reporting by Statistics Canada. The vertical dashed line indicates the implementation of the Canada-Colombia Free Trade Agreement (CCoFTA) on August 15, 2011.

Source: Global Affairs Canada, Office of the Chief Economist; based on calculations from Statistics Canada Table 36-10-0007-01 (accessed April 2026).

Travel services constitute the largest component of Canadian services exports to Colombia, accounting for 76.9 percent of the total in 2024 after growing from $63 million in 2010 to $504 million (Table 2). This category reflects expenditures by Colombian visitors to Canada for tourism, education, and business purposes.  Commercial services make up 16.3 percent of exports ($107 million), with maintenance and repair ($28 million) and architectural and engineering services ($27 million) together representing half the commercial total. Transport and government services account for the remaining 6.7 percent ($44 million). Within commercial sub-sectors, growth was uneven: architectural and engineering services expanded fivefold since 2010, while telecommunications services contracted by two thirds over the same period.

Table 2: Composition of Canadian Services Exports to Colombia (2010 vs 2024)

Note: All monetary values are in millions of Canadian dollars. ‘Commercial Services (Total)’ represents the aggregate of the indented sub-sectors. ‘Growth’ reflects the percentage change from 2010 to 2024.
Source: Global Affairs Canada, Office of the Chief Economist; based on calculations from Statistics Canada Table 36-10-0007-01 and Table 12-10-0145-01 (accessed April 2026).

Intensive margin and extensive margin growth

The breadth of traded product categories provides a second measure of integration. Trade expansion occurs through two channels: increased volumes in existing product categories (the intensive margin) and the introduction of new products to the trading relationship (the extensive margin). Trade barriers can render certain product categories commercially unviable, particularly where margins are thin or volumes are small. Excessively high tariffs, particularly on agricultural products, can completely suppress a product category and eliminate any bilateral commerce that might otherwise occur. By lowering these barriers, free trade agreements can open categories that previously fell below the threshold of commercial feasibility, broadening the base of bilateral trade. A trading relationship that expands across more product categories proves more resilient to sector-specific shocks than one concentrated in a narrow set of goods.

To examine this dimension, bilateral trade was disaggregated into two groups for each direction: “least traded products” and all other products.^{Footnote 4} Because bilateral trade is extremely concentrated, this bottom 10 percent of value encompasses 96.9 percent of export product lines and 99.6 percent of import product lines. The remaining small fraction of lines, products such as crude petroleum, coal briquettes, coffee, and wheat, account for 90 percent of trade value. Figure 3 tracks how each group's trade value changed relative to 2010. Products that were least traded before the agreement grew far faster than established products in both directions. Least traded Canadian exports rose steadily following entry into force, reaching roughly three times their 2010 level by 2025. Least traded imports from Colombia followed a similar upward trajectory, reaching approximately five and a half times the 2010 level by 2024, before surging to twenty times in 2025. The final-year spike is attributable almost entirely to non-monetary gold (doré) imports from Colombian mining operations, which rose from virtually zero before the agreement to $1.1 billion in 2025. Products already traded intensively recorded comparatively modest growth in both directions over the same period. Of the $551 million total increase in Canadian exports between 2010 and 2025, least traded products accounted for 31.8 percent despite representing only 10 percent of pre-FTA export value (Table 3). Least traded products contributed 69.1 percent of the $2.0 billion increase in imports, a share substantially shaped by the gold imports noted above. The top five least traded products by 2025 value in each direction span agriculture, critical minerals, energy products, and processed foods, with individual growth multiples ranging from 10-fold to entirely new trade flows that did not exist before the agreement.

Figure 3: Least Traded Products: Trade Value Index (2010–2025)

Data: Global Trade Atlas and CEPII BACI database.
Source: Global Affairs Canada, Office of the Chief Economist.

Note: The figure indexes total trade value (2010 = 100) for least traded products (LTPs) and non-LTP products in each direction. LTPs are defined as the set of products with the lowest pre-FTA bilateral trade that collectively account for 10 percent of the pair’s average 2008–2010 trade value, including zero-trade products. The product universe comprises 5,063 HS 2007 codes. All product codes were harmonized to the HS 2007 nomenclature using concordance tables from the World Bank’s World Integrated Trade Solution (WITS). Canadian exports are derived from Colombian import statistics (mirror data); Canadian imports are reported directly. The vertical dashed line indicates the entry into force of the CCoFTA in 2011.

Source: Global Affairs Canada, Office of the Chief Economist; based on calculations from the Global Trade Atlas and CEPII BACI databases (accessed April 2026).

Table 3: Trade Growth Decomposition and Top Least Traded Products (2010–2025)

Note: All values are in millions of Canadian dollars. Least traded products (LTPs) are defined as the set of HS6 products with the lowest average bilateral trade value over 2008–2010 that collectively account for 10 percent of the pair’s pre-FTA trade, including zero-trade products. The product universe of 5,063 HS 2007 codes is constructed from the BACI global trade database (2008–2010), supplemented with codes appearing in bilateral trade data but absent from BACI. “Share of Growth” reports each group’s contribution to the total change in trade value between 2010 and 2025. Pre-FTA value in the upper panel uses the 2010 annual trade value; LTP classification uses the 2008–2010 average. Lower panel: Top 5 least traded products ranked by 2025 trade value. “Pre-FTA Avg.” is the average annual trade value over 2008–2010. “Growth” is the percentage change from the pre-FTA average to the 2025 value; “new” indicates zero pre-FTA trade.

Source: Global Affairs Canada, Office of the Chief Economist; based on calculations from the Global Trade Atlas and CEPII BACI databases (accessed April 2026).

Preference margin growth

The preceding analysis shows that least traded products drove the majority of bilateral trade growth, but does not distinguish whether that growth concentrated in categories where the agreement provided the largest tariff reductions. The preference margin, defined as the difference between each country’s MFN applied rate in 2010 and its preferential rate offered to the FTA partner in 2023, measures the depth of liberalization at the product level.^{Footnote 5} Figure 4 bins bilateral exports by this margin and compares compound annual growth rates across bins.

Canadian exports grew fastest in the categories that received the deepest preferences. Products in the 5 to 10 percent margin bin expanded at 6.9 percent annually and reached $447 million by 2023, while those with margins of 10 percent or more grew at 6.0 percent and totalled $801 million. By contrast, Canadian products that faced zero MFN tariffs before the agreement contracted at 6.8 percent annually, falling to $109 million. This pattern is consistent with Colombia’s comparatively high pre-agreement tariff structure: Colombia’s trade-weighted average MFN rate stood at 12.3 percent in 2010, more than double Canada’s 5.5 percent,^{Footnote 6} creating substantial scope for preferential access to redirect Canadian exports toward newly liberalized product categories. The relationship is less pronounced for Colombian exports to Canada, where the zero-margin bin, led by gold and unroasted coffee, accounts for the bulk of trade at $1.1 billion and higher-margin categories remain small.

Figure 4: Bilateral Export Growth by CCoFTA Tariff Reduction (2010–2023)

Data: World Integrated Trade Solutions (WITS) TRAINS database, Global Trade Atlas database.
Source: Global Affairs Canada, Office of the Chief Economist.

Note: Tariff reduction is calculated as the difference between each country’s MFN applied rate in 2010 and its preferential rate offered to the FTA partner in 2023. Products are binned by tariff reduction at the HS6 level, with trade values aggregated within each bin. Dollar values indicate 2023 exports (in CAD). CAGR is the compound annual growth rate over the 13-year period. Tariff data are concorded from HS 2022 to HS 2007 nomenclature to ensure consistency across years.

Source: Global Affairs Canada, Office of the Chief Economist; based on calculations of tariff data from the World Integrated Trade Solutions (WITS) TRAINS database and bilateral trade data from the Global Trade Atlas database (accessed April 2026).

Preference utilization

To claim FTA tariff preferential treatment, importing firms must initiate the process, which involves administrative costs and documentation. The preference utilization rate (PUR) measures the share of eligible trade that claims preferential treatment; the coverage ratio measures the share of total trade where preferences could provide additional benefit beyond existing duty-free MFN access.

The coverage ratio on Canadian exports reached 34.7 percent in 2024, while the ratio on Canadian imports stood at 16.2 percent, as many Canadian imports from Colombia, particularly gold and coffee, already entered duty-free under MFN rates (Table 4). Where preferences were available, both directions utilized them at broadly comparable rates: Canadian exports claimed CCoFTA preferences on 76.9 percent of eligible trade in 2024, realizing $67.5 million in duty savings, while Canadian imports claimed preferences on 72.8 percent, generating $14.0 million. Agriculture and food products drove utilization in both directions. The PUR on Canadian agricultural exports reached 98.4 percent, with $57.9 million in savings representing 86 percent of the export total, while the PUR on Canadian agricultural imports reached 91.9 percent, accounting for $11.6 million of the $14.0 million total. Chemicals and plastics showed the largest gap between potential and realized savings in both directions: Canadian exports claimed only 42.0 percent of eligible trade in that sector, leaving $4.8 million unclaimed, while Canadian imports claimed 18.2 percent, leaving $1.8 million unclaimed.

Table 4: CCoFTA Utilization and Savings by Sector, Bilateral Trade (2024)

Note: All monetary values are in millions of Canadian dollars. Aggregated CCoFTA Preference Utilization Rate (PUR), Coverage Ratio, and estimated duty savings by sector for Canadian exports to Colombia and Canadian imports from Colombia in 2024. Colombian data converted using the Bank of Canada 2024 annual average exchange rate. ‘Eligible Trade’ includes goods with a non-zero MFN tariff rate where a CCoFTA preference exists (margin > 0). ‘Coverage Ratio’ is the share of total trade eligible. ‘PUR’ is the share of eligible trade that claimed the CCoFTA tariff. ‘Actual Savings’ estimates duties saved. ‘Unclaimed Savings’ estimates potential savings foregone. For 24 Colombian tariff lines subject to the Sistema Andino de Franjas de Precios (SAFP), only the base ad valorem component of the compound rate is used; the variable SAFP levy is excluded, meaning the true MFN burden and preference margin are understated for these lines. Sectors: Agriculture & Food (HS 01–24), Metals & Minerals (HS 25–27, 72–83), Chemicals & Plastics (HS 28–40), Wood, Pulp & Paper (HS 44–49), Textiles & Apparel (HS 50–63), Machinery & Electronics (HS 84–85), Transportation (HS 86–89), Miscellaneous (all other).

Source: Global Affairs Canada, Office of the Chief Economist; based on calculations from 2024 customs data from Canada and Colombia.

Conclusion

Fifteen years of implementation confirm that the CCoFTA expanded bilateral trade and created measurable tariff savings for firms on both sides, though Canadian exports grew more slowly than imports from Colombia. Bilateral merchandise trade grew from $1.6 billion to $4.1 billion between 2010 and 2025, with much of the growth in Colombian exports to Canada concentrated in newly emergent flows, led by non-monetary gold. Products barely traded before the agreement drove roughly a third of Canadian export growth, broadening the base of bilateral commerce. Canadian exports grew fastest in categories where the agreement provided the deepest tariff reductions. Services trade followed a similar trajectory: bilateral flows expanded from $220 million to $1.2 billion, driven by an eightfold increase in Colombian travel expenditures in Canada. Together, preference utilization rates above 70 percent on both sides generated $81.5 million in combined duty savings in 2024 alone.