Parmindar Singh is a fourth generation dairy farmer from the Waikato and managing director of her family’s dairy farming business. Her great-grandfather migrated from India to New Zealand in the early 1900s. She lectured at Wintec for eight years, then worked in learning and development at Fonterra, Hamilton City Council and the Wise Group while running the farm business alongside it. Governance followed, including an associate directorship at OSPRI and trusteeships with the Gordonton Woodlands Trust and Trust Waikato.

She came back to study after two decades away, enrolling in a master’s in management majoring in agri-business at the University of Waikato and writing a dissertation on the future of New Zealand dairy markets. The concern behind it was concentration. New Zealand exports more than 90% of its dairy production and is the world’s leading supplier of whole milk powder to China, an arrangement that has paid well and leaves little room if it falters. Singh applied to Nuffield to work out where else the product could go.

She started at the Contemporary Scholars Conference in Norfolk in March 2022, the first since Covid, where she and fellow scholar Lucie Douma presented the New Zealand food and fibre sector to scholars from fifteen countries. She then studied Dubai, Tokyo and Singapore as gateway cities, hubs that draw product in and push it out across a region rather than markets in their own right. Singapore and the UAE import more than 90% of their food, a mirror of New Zealand’s position. Her report, published in April 2023, put the UAE, Japan and Singapore among the largest importers of whole milk powder, skim milk powder, cheese and butter across Asia and the Middle East, and identified cheese as the product with the most room to grow. She has since taken the work into doctoral study at Waikato.