This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, February 17th, 2011.

I'm Caleb Brown.

A free trade pact with Colombia is waiting in the wings and the Obama administration wants to

get it done this year.

But that trade agreement has been waiting to be passed for some time.

So why the wait?

Dan Griswalt, director of the Cato Institute Center for Trade Policy Studies,

is co-author of a new free trade

bulletin. Trade agreement would promote US exports and Colombian civil society.

What does the US get out of a deal with Colombia? They're not a particularly large trading partner. You think of trade agreements, you think, you know, NAFTA or even South Korea.

This agreement's not as big commercially as say NAFTA or even the South Korea agreement, but

Columbia is a significant market, 45 million people there.

They are already our third largest export market in Latin America behind only

Mexico and Brazil. What we get out of the agreement is the elimination of trade

barriers in Colombia to U.S. exports.

According to the estimates of the U.S. International Trade Commission, that could boost U.S.

exports by a billion dollars a year, which is not insignificant.

The stuff from Columbia,

Columbia's exports to the United States,

already come into the United States,

terror-free, and that's a good thing.

They come in terror-free because of the Andean Trade Preferences Act, which Congress passed in

...