Earlier this month the federal government announced the signing of a new bilateral free-trade agreement with Colombia.

Canadian Pork Council president Jurgen Preugschas says Canadian pork producers would prefer to see progress on the multilateral front but, in the absence of a world trade agreement, these regional bilateral agreements are critical.

Jurgen Preugschas-Canadian Pork Council

It's very important that we don't get behind countries like the United States and other exporters, that they have preferential access to these markets.

In light of the fact that the WTO, Doha Round, hasn't been settled it's very important that they continue to negotiate these bilateral deals.

Our government is working on several others.

They're working on more South American Countries and I'm hopeful with the APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation) conference in Peru just completed that maybe some more headway is being made there.

We're certainly still hopeful that the Korean deal will be completed and that that one gets done.

On top of that certainly the discussions with the EU are quite important as well.

Then there's many other countries that they're starting to talk to and hopefully, again, bringing it back to the WTO.

We'd rather it get signed but we don't want to lose track of and get behind these other countries by stopping the bilateral discussions.

Preugschas stresses agriculture is very dependent on export markets so any deal that can be made bilaterally or multilaterally is important.

The new trade agreement with Colombia still needs to be ratified by both the Canadian and Colombian governments.