The Tuesday Interview | ‘New Zealand keen on enhancing defence dialogue, cooperation with India’

Last week, New Zealand’s Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister, Winston Peters, embarked on a diplomatic mission to India to strengthen relations. During his visit, Peters engaged with top officials on topics ranging from defence to trade. New Zealand, a major exporter of milk products, seeks to enhance ties with India, known for safeguarding its local industries. DH’s Jack Marshall interviewed Peters in Delhi to inquire about fostering business ties between an exporting country and a self-sufficient nation.

Edited excerpts: 

New Zealand has a new government and wants closer relations with India. How is your government changing its engagement strategy with India?

First, we’re committed to working flat out to improve our relationship. There’ll be no more drift and lack of engagement that happened over the last three years. We’re trying to see where we can do better regarding our relationship with India, particularly in the area of security. Secondly, we strive for deeper economic cooperation across various sectors.

We started this trip in Gujarat to look at this very successful state, a very forward-looking state, and see their options and ideas there. Its population is over 10 times larger than New Zealand’s, and yet we aren’t too far apart in GDP. If we could get serious engagement with one state’s business alone, that’d be great for a country like New Zealand. So if you ask me, how will we do it? Well, the answer is that we are putting our minds together to make the best plan to get the best engagement possible to improve the outcomes of New Zealand’s connection with India. We’ve done it with other countries, so why haven’t we got one here? The answer has often been because of the nature of the economy itself. But all of a sudden, it’s changing in India, and these changes will lead to far greater engagement.

India is very protective of its dairy industry, and probably rightly so. What other areas do you see the two countries collaborating on? 

Despite India’s protective stance on dairy, if you look at the structure of the dairy industry, there are opportunities for us to cooperate, especially in technological advancements related to milk production. While India is a massive producer, it’s not as productive as other dairy-producing countries. Additionally, we are setting out to help the Indian kiwifruit food industry because they’re selling at the time of year we’re not. Our question is, can we explore duty-free trade options when you have no product that’s competing with ours? Those are the areas we have to seriously think about.

Besides trade, in what other areas can the two countrues increase cooperation?

Defence is one area. India is concerned about ongoing defence arrangements. We would like to participate, as we have been. We have substantially stepped up conversations with India on defence matters in the last two years. Then there are other areas, like international engagement, where India might be interested in our help or knowledge from our part of the world. The Pacific is an area where New Zealand is an authority. That’s where we want to be helping in every way as a reliable partner whose word India can trust.

India recently signed a free trade agreement with the European Foreign Trade Association. Does this signify that India is more open to free trade agreements?

It’s irrefutable that those free trade agreements signal India’s increasing openness to international engagement; there’s no doubt about that evidence, but it did take 16 years for the European Free Trade Association. 

What do you think India wants?

I think India is just discovering that itself. They’re discovering exactly what they need and want. Some things I’ve seen here are quite exciting. It feels more open. But it’s clear as daylight: It’s India first, as you’d expect it to be.

How do you build close and meaningful relationships with a country that wants to be independent and self-sufficient?

That is significant economic theory being espoused there about being self-sufficient. A lot of countries have historically held that view of their needs going forward. New Zealand has areas where we could be doing things more self-sufficiently. Some of us in New Zealand are very confused about the fact that we have the most natural, cleanest water in the world, but we import Perrier water from somewhere else. Import substitution has benefits, but if you can do it yourself and keep the money in your economy, then your economy is going to grow much larger. We understand that, but it’s a philosophical crisis, so to speak. But when you deal with India, you have to respect what they want. 1.4 billion people are right to have their views, and you’re not going to change them overnight. But as time goes by, even they will recognise that we actually need more friends than we’ve got. I think we’ve got an enormous chance, based on some of the conversations I’ve had so far, to explore what both our countries can do together.

(Jack Marshall is a journalist from New Zealand. He is interning at DH with support from the Asia New Zealand Foundation, an independent charity largely funded by the New Zealand Government.)