Chinese demand for our biggest export - dairy - is underpinning a healthy farmgate milk price for the current season, just as it did last season.
The upgrade will make exporting to China easier and cheaper by, for example, simplifying documentation requirements and establishing dedicated contacts for New Zealand businesses at key ports.
All safeguard tariffs in dairy are set to be eliminated within one year for most products, and three years for milk powder.
This means that by January 1, 2024, all New Zealand dairy exports to China will be tariff-free.
Dairy exports aside, China's appetite for beef and sheepmeat has become a key plank for New Zealand's second biggest export industry.
The agreement has already provided significant benefits to New Zealand's red meat sector since its original signing in 2008.
Over that period, New Zealand's meat exports to China have grown from around $600 million to $3.5 billion a year, to a point where it now makes up 36 per cent of the sector's exports overall.
And in forestry, the People's Republic has been the sector's most important customer by far, with the wood industry exports totalling $3.3b a year.
Furthermore, the wood industry views the upgrade as consolidating its access and opening the way for more processed timber exports.
Export NZ says the agreement will also mean 99 per cent of New Zealand's wood and paper trade to China will have tariff-free access.
With tourism having suffered something akin to an amputation due to Covid-19 travel restrictions, a robust primary sector is playing an even greater role in the nation's economic recovery.
As always, exporters have to be prepared for disruption.
World markets can change quickly and there is always the risk that exporters can end up with too many eggs in too few baskets.
Since its original signing, the free trade agreement has acted to underpin New Zealand's primary sector at time when access to its traditional, long-run markets was becoming increasingly challenged.
While the political and cultural divides between New Zealand and China are wide, a genuine supply-demand relationship exists between the two.
Refreshingly, conversations with China are more likely to centre on how New Zealand exporters can best meet demand as opposed to limits on market access, as has historically been the case with our other more traditional Northern Hemisphere markets.
In the big picture, China's economy continues to grow, even in these straitened times.
China's middle class expands at a rapid rate, and its consumers are going more up-market in their choices.
That dynamic is not going to change any time soon, so an improved free trade agreement with the world's second biggest economy is win for New Zealand's exporters, and the country as a whole.
