During the beginning of 2010 the trade relationship between China and South America went though some difficulties, based on restrictions by Argentina on Chinese imports. China stopped purchasing Argentinean soy oil at once, which was India’s choice to jump in and triple its own soybean import. 

Soon after some meetings between the Ministers of Agriculture of India and Argentina contracts concerning an agricultural cooperation were signed. The relationship has turned out to be a promising one. 

In Argentina alone there are 14 Indian companies that employ around 7000 workers. India has invested around $12 billion during the last ten years including energy, agrochemicals, IT, manufacturing, pharmaceuticals and mining throughout South America. Large countries such as Brazil and Chile, but also smaller countries including Uruguay and Bolivia have all benefitted from the new trade system with India. 

Even though the Indian-South American trade values are not even near to the ones that China had with Latin America, but the numbers are increasing rapidly. The only aspects that are posing a problem to the relationship are cultural, geographic and time-related but thanks to modern technology they can be solved easily. 

Data has shown that the close collaboration between India and South America has helped the latter to achieve the best economic numbers that it has in a long time and heightened the prices of goods. Exports to markets in Europe and North America have been diversified. At the same time it enabled Latin America to pay off its debts and raise their currency. 

India and South America are not the most respected countries around the world and whereas India is often considered to be “third-world backwater” with its inner-country conflicts and far-spread poverty, South America has a reputation of often being struck by inflation, earthquakes and coups. 

Each country saw in the other skills and goods they did not possess. South America is valued for producing traditional wares such as textiles, and new ones such as cosmetics, cars and pharmaceuticals. India in return is in demand for its extraordinary skills in the IT sector. Together they make up the new leading South. 

South America can offer sugar and soybean oil to India, goods that they will never be able to produce, but always need and with its enormous oil fields it has also become attractive to India in the energy sector. 

Since South America still exports the largest amount of goods to China it has been debated whether the trade gap between South America and India will ever disappear, but data shows that India has achieved trends similar to the ones China had when it started trading about thirteen years earlier.