Food and Agribusiness leader Angeline Achariya spoke at GMC’s India Export Forum and shared some fascinating insights about food and agribusiness innovation, global uncertainty and why our current thinking is too narrow for the times we live in.
Angeline shares her thoughts on the Australia-India relationship below:
We need to stop thinking about India as a market and start thinking about India as a partner.
Earlier this week, I spoke at the Geelong Manufacturing Council’s India Export Forum breakfast. The room was full of the right people, food and agribusiness manufacturers, logistics leaders, industry professionals who are serious about where Australian agriculture goes next.
And my central message was this: the framing of ‘exporting to India’ is too small for the moment we are in.
In an era of geopolitical uncertainty, volatile/fracturing supply chains, and accelerating pressure on food sovereignty, the Australia-India relationship has the potential to be something far more significant than a trade corridor. It can be an innovation partnership. One built on shared IP, joint R&D, co-developed processing capability, and the kind of complementarity that makes both economies more resilient.
Australia brings food safety credentials, precision innovation, and clean provenance. India brings scale, processing depth, frugal engineering, and distribution reach across a billion consumers. Together, we have a proposition that is competitive not just bilaterally but in third markets, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and beyond.
But that only happens if we stop approaching India transactionally.
Agripower Australia Limited is a great example. They did not find a distributor and ship product. They built a wholly-owned Indian subsidiary, Agripower Fertilisers India with local staff, local commercial leadership, and distribution now spanning 14 countries. An Australian agtech innovation embedded into Indian agriculture. That is a partnership. That is shared capability. And that is the model that holds when the geopolitical ground shifts beneath you.
The businesses that will define the next decade of Australia-India engagement are not the ones who treated India as a destination for surplus product. They are the ones who treated Indian partners as intellectual equals with something to teach as well as something to buy.
The food and agribusiness sector has an opportunity to lead this shift. We sit at the intersection of food security, climate resilience, and sovereign capability all of which are now geopolitical priorities for both nations. That is not a trade conversation. It is a strategy conversation.
We’re looking forward to hearing more from Angeline when she joins a host of industry leaders at GMC’s flagship Technology & Innovation Summit in Geelong 29-20 April. Book your tickets now.