> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://goodoil.news/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # The India FTA - URL: https://goodoil.news/the-india-fta/ - Published: 2026-10-08T21:00:50.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-08T21:32:12.000Z - Description: My nose tells me something stinks. Why India locked the milk out – and why Wellington did not count it the same way. - Author: Guest Post - Tags: NZ Politics **LilBaP** India is the world’s biggest milk producer at about 248 million tonnes a year, about a quarter of the total. Behind that is not a handful of corporates. Official figures put it at roughly 80 million rural households on dairy, most with one to three animals. The last livestock census counted about 126 million milch cows and buffaloes, inside a bovine herd of around 300 million. That is a voting bloc. Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat, Maharashtra – you do not open the door to New Zealand milk. Delhi has said so out loud. Dairy stays out of their FTAs and they have already walked away from bigger tables than ours to keep it that way. New Zealand’s dairy farm count is about 10-11 thousand, not the tens of millions. Sheep and wool got to the entry door; our milk, cream, butter, cheese and whey didn’t. India protected its small herds because that decides elections. Wellington sold ‘export revenue’ and called it a great achievement. Modi understood his voters and counted the farmers. National wanted a press release and hoped nobody would fact-check – not many did. Officials will say the milk vat is not quite locked. There is a fast-track so dairy ingredients can go into India duty-free if an Indian plant processes them and ships the finished goods out. Bulk infant formula and peptones are on a seven-year phase-down. But retail infant formula, milk, cream, cheese, butter and whey stay out. Core dairy tariffs stay where they are, in the 33–60 per cent range. We sell the raw milk product. Their factory takes the margin and the brand on the shelf. That is on-selling the benefit of our milk. The premium sits in their processing hall, not here at home. If this is a win for the farmer – it is only a temporary illusion. Immigration New Zealand agreed a Temporary Employment Entry cap: 5,000 Indian workers in the country at any one time, with stays of up to three years. Most of that is skills-list work – health, teaching, IT and engineering. A slice of 600 at once is set aside for specified ‘iconic’ jobs: yoga instructors, AYUSH practitioners, Indian chefs and music teachers. On top: 1,000 working-holiday visas a year, plus easier student and post-study work settings. It is not an open border, but it is also not nothing – especially if nobody is watching who stays. Three years is a long season on a farm or in a plant. Pathways to stay longer still sit in ordinary immigration rules, which governments can change. India asked for people. New Zealand asked for customers. Does this sound like the deal of a lifetime? I still smell something fishy (not butter chicken). UNDRIP, Māori interest clauses and Paris Then the Treaty language, the culture chapter and the climate text all bundled into the same document. That is how Wellington’s elites now drafts trade papers. My only surprise is that the Waitangi Tribunal did not get a co-author credit on the agreement. Almost every recent NZ deal carries three extras: A Treaty exception – so the Crown can still do Treaty things without being sued for ‘discrimination’ under the trade rules. A legal shield for the government. A culture/traditional knowledge chapter that discusses rongoa, intellectual property and ‘Māori’ enterprise. India would not even put ‘Indigenous Peoples’ in the chapter title. Delhi’s line is that after independence all Indians are indigenous, so UNDRIP does not map onto India. A trade and sustainable development chapter – labour and environment talk, ‘endeavour’ to cooperate on climate, a nod to Paris and even Article 6 carbon trading. It is not a court that slaps a tariff on lamb if someone misses a target, but is also not nothing. This is how a later government, or a later buyer, starts lecturing the farm. India has long called labour and climate clauses a rich-country sales trick. So it seems odd that it was New Zealand officials who insisted the clauses be included. You do not need UNDRIP or a Māori interest section to sell wool or kiwifruit or much else for that matter. You do not need a Paris paragraph either. Those clauses exist because NZ’s bureaucrats write them in. Indian smallholders and Kiwi businesses did not ask for them to be included. Also, New Zealand now has to ‘promote’ roughly NZ$34 billion of private investment into India over 15 years. If Delhi later says we did not ‘promote’ enough – which of course they likely will – they will talk about putting tariffs back on. Most people in NZ would much rather see that sort of money spent on New Zealand infrastructure first. Immigration, Treaty language, climate text and an investment target rode in the same free trade agreement. Please can you explain, National and ACT, what these have to do with trading any NZ made product? A few weeks ago Paul Henry sat with Peter Williams and talked up the India deal: brilliant, overdue, especially dairy. That is a media man who read only the press release. The sharpest disappointment is that ACT signed up to this. A party that talks open markets and less government should be the last one to sell a locked milk vat as free trade. India got people and a shop door free of entry. We got a press release and a virtue list. ACT called that a massive moment. None of that changes the 70/30 rule. If about 70 per cent of a party’s policy is something you can live with, and nobody else is closer, that is where the party vote should go. In this climate, that bar is hard to clear. This deal contradicts the rest of ACT’s election pitch. That is why it stings more from them. The money train A CBDC is just electronic money issued by a central bank, not by your trading bank. It is not a Bitcoin. It is a line on the state’s ledger and India is already trialling an e-rupee. Our Reserve Bank has looked at one and has not issued it. India is the world’s biggest receiver of remittances. A faster train means wages, fees and investment can leave New Zealand and land in India in seconds. This might be fine for a family sending money home but different when the same paper tells us to ‘promote’ about NZ$34 billion of private investment into India over 15 years. That clause is in there because India wanted a cheaper, faster pipeline. You do not need a digital rupee to sell lamb, wool or kiwifruit. We have managed without one for decades . India sits in BRICS. There is no BRICS currency. What they want is to settle more trade in their own currencies, and in time to link payment systems, so the US dollar is not always in the middle. Fair enough for them. New Zealand is not in that club. We still signed a payments-and-investment chapter with a member who is building it. Those rules were written for Delhi. Farmer Joe did not ask for them. We did not join the club. We just agreed to talk about the pipeline. Who keeps the recipe – the knowledge? The FTA does not say “India may steal a New Zealand patent and pay nothing.” What it does is build a middleman. The factory clause: dairy ingredients can go into India duty-free if an Indian plant processes them and ships the finished goods out. The ‘partnership’: Agriculture cooperation – livestock, horticulture, productivity, science. Officials call it helping each other. On a farm it means methods, genetics and process walk across the table. Once that knowledge is in their plant, they do not need our permission to sell the next container – or to charge the next buyer. Royalties exist if the contract says so. The risk is the loose contract: a joint project, a process taught on site, a product mixed in their factory. They sell their finished good. NZ invoices an ingredient or a workshop. India keeps the premium on the shelf price. Sell the commodity and the know-how. You can tell yourself you still own the brand, but the customer buys from the middleman. So who gets the biggest part of the pie? We export the recipe. We get the price for the flour. They will export the cake and take the premium. Now ask the question the press release skipped: what comes the other way? Under this deal, India gets zero duty on everything they send here, from day one. That is medicines and generic drugs, clothing and household textiles, machinery and vehicle parts, jewellery, spices, rice and leather goods – the stuff already on the supermarket and pharmacy shelf. Perhaps it will be a bit of competition at the supermarkets? No, because our entry tariffs are already about two per cent or nothing. So ask yourself who benefits the most. The Indian Government gets an immigration quota, a faster money transfer and the use of our knowledge so their factory can keep the middleman’s premium. Lots of meaningless jargon about UNDRIP, Paris, Treaty obligation, Māori special interest and so forth, which they did not care about in the first place. Modi and co likely remain electable in India, because they kept on side with farmers by barring our milk. Other than being told to count our blessings, consider what NZ gets from this deal – then ask why some political parties pushed this policy. The smell is buried in the agreement and it will not air out. Follow the money. It is the only thing in the document that knows which way it is going.