There was no summits, no red carpet, no common press conference broadcast live from a palace lawn. Instead, for two days last week in Palacio San Martín in Buenos Aires, the technocrats of two countries (11 time zones between them) sat at a table and did this is not a headline something, rare enough, that changes the way nations feed, medicate and power each other, line by line.

The fourth deliberative meeting between the Joint Trade Committee of India and Argentina took place on 24th August led by the Commerce Secretary Rajesh Agrawal in India and the Secretary for International Economic Relations of Argentina, Ambassador Fernando Brun. The bilateral trade is cross 6.5 billion dollars in 2025, thus exceeding by more than 17 percent for the year, making India as the fifth largest trading partner of Argentina in the whole globe. It's an impressive ranking for a relationship that most people in both countries might find hard to spell out. It's just as well as it is as not that this is an assessment of the potential forces of the old India-Argentina narrative, not the pace at which those forces have been moving lately.

The numbers in this calculation have been nearly too easy to figure for decades: Argentina exported cooking oil to India and India exported fuel and machinery to Argentina. If you look at what is traded today, you'll find that the same pattern still exists, but is now larger. Most of the oil that enters Indian ports comes from Argentina, and most of the oil that leaves comes in the form of soybean oil. On the other hand, most of India's refined fuels, engineering goods, organic chemicals and vehicles are exported to Argentina. Such a relationship, which is almost entirely based on one commodity, is far more precarious than it might appear to be, and both governments have apparently come to the conclusion that diversity in the basket can no longer wait.

That's where the pharmaceutical announcement comes in more useful than its bland regulatory-speak. Argentina has agreed to take steps to bring India from Annex II to Annex I of its drug regulatory regime, which would allow Indian pharmaceutical firms to register and sell drugs in the country with virtually no hassle as compared to what they are currently doing. India already provides a significant proportion of generic medicines to the world, and Argentina, like many other Latin American countries, has been working to contain health-care expenses in the face of a currency crisis and years of inflation that have put a strain on most family budgets. One of the only trade advantages that appears on a pharmacy bill and not a government ledger is cheaper Indian generics, so that's where both sides started.

The farming part of the table is as mysterious as a mirror image. Technical teams have been dealing with the sanitary and phytosanitary approvals that will allow Indian onions, milk and dairy products, grapes, potatoes, bananas and pulses to enter the Argentine market for the first time on a large scale. None of this can occur in a flash; SPS clearances require lab testing and pest-risk assessments or inspection protocols that can take years. But the direction of travel is important, as it is a sign Argentina does intend to open a market that has long been closed to its own agricultural producers, in return for market openings in other sectors, such as pharmaceuticals and critical minerals.

Which leads to the most important and least talked about thread in this entire negotiation: lithium. The state-run minerals hunter KABIL has finished Phase II drilling at its project in Catamarca province in the so called Lithium Triangle, where India shares with Chile and Bolivia and where it has some of the richest deposits of brine in the world. In addition, exploration efforts have been started in Salta and Jujuy. This is no minor side deal. India has negligible lithium reserves of any significance and has been visibly anxious at witnessing South American and African lithium processing resources and mining interests seized up by the Chinese in the last decade. A tonne of lithium India can get through a bilateral deal instead of open market price is 1 tonne that India will not need to compete with China to obtain later at a worse price with lesser leverage.

On the other hand, Argentina has a resource boom that it simply cannot afford and cannot develop on its own, and a partner that's capital rich and technology hungry like India, but not burdened with the geopolitical issues of increased Chinese engagement, is a useful counterweight.

The two governments also took the step forward in the talks on aviation, space technology, telecommunications, 5G and digital infrastructure, and the stalled effort to expand the India-MERCOSUR Preferential Trade Agreement, which has been signed since 2004 but only included a small portion of tradeable goods. Achievement of a common TOR and the introduction of a digital certificate of origin is bureaucratic but very much what will make the difference to the growth of trade.

This does not negate the inequalities. The economy and the currency are volatile, and politics can swing sharply, sometimes even potentially toppling well-negotiated trade arrangements in under a year of elections.

India on its part continues to have an unbalanced trade relationship with Argentina with a single commodity category and regulatory improvements on paper don't mean on the ground. What emerged from Buenos Aires last week was not a bold statement, but rather a list of specific, rather mundane commitments: annex reclassifications, SPS protocols, drilling phases, terms of reference. That's typically the way a durable trade relationship is actually formed, through the mundane technical concession, rather than partnership, one step at a time.