It is certain that a free-trade agreement (FTA) will be on New Zealand's topmost agenda when Prime Minister John Key visits India on a four-day state visit next week.
PM Key has long been looking to sign an FTA with India and is willing to put a lot of emotional capital towards the felicitation of this deal between the two countries.
Earlier this year when Indian President Pranab Mukherjee arrived in New Zealand on a 3-day state visit, Key has used the opportunity to push for an FTA. It is clear that the Prime Minister will yet again push for the deal when he meets his Indian counterpart Narendra Modi in the coming week.
Highlighting the opportunities that the country can benefit from forging stronger trade ties with India, Key said, “India, like China, is among the prominent population bases of the world. India's population demography is very similar to that of China—over a billion people, relatively young, and rapidly growing. Our two-way bilateral trade with China is around $20 billion whereas with India it is $2 billion. So you can see the kind of opportunities that lie there.”
It is significant to note that New Zealand had made India the subject of its first "NZ Inc" strategy in 2011.
The NZ Inc strategies are part of the government’s plan to strengthen the country’s economic, political and security relationships with some of its key international partners.
These strategies set ambitious five-year goals and actions required to achieve them.
The NZ Inc India strategy had set the ambitious goal of growing merchandise exports to at least $2 billion by 2015 and services trade with India by an average of 20% per year.
Although the two-way trade between two countries has grown by 41% to $2.4 billion, it is still short of the initial target set in the NZ Inc India strategy.
There is an understandable uneasiness among some quarters within the New Zealand bureaucracy, businesses, media and other stakeholders over the perceived delay in signing of the FTA.
The Prime Minister himself knows the time required in carrying out such negotiations, and he has rightly cautioned everyone to restrain their expectations on the signing of the deal.
"Such talks take a lot of time, lot more than what people think," he said.
Yet, it is in everyone's best interest that the stakeholders on the Indian side acknowledge this uneasiness in some sections in New Zealand.
New Zealand is essentially a trading nation, and like every other trading nation in the world, its overall political relationship with other countries in the world is determined by the efficacy of doing the mutual trade.
India will be well served to see New Zealand as an essential trading state of the Asia-Pacific region—a region where a geopolitical shift of power is taking place in global politics, a region to which India earnestly wants to belong.
New Zealand offers India the opportunity in geoeconomics that can complement its geopolitical ambitions in the Asia-Pacific region.
And the current establishment in New Delhi is keen on both, geopolitics and geoeconomics.
Keeping in mind India's rising geopolitical ambitions around the world and especially in the Asia-Pacific region, it seems that New Zealand's geo-economic value has been undersold to those who matter in New Delhi.
Consequently, a repositioning of New Zealand in India as a “trading partner in the Asia-Pacific" with a relative free-flow of goods, services, and people between them could move mountains towards effectuating an FTA.
It is prudent to conclude with Andre Gide's quote that "one does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time”.
India needs to re-evaluate New Zealand's geo-economic value for its geopolitical ambitions.