About 10 years ago, I tried my hand at making a true New York-style baked cheesecake from scratch. The recipe, which I found on YouTube, required me to buy Philadelphia cream cheese. I had bought it from the US the previous year, and had been pleasantly surprised by how cheap it was. An 8-ounce pack, or roughly 230 grams, had cost me about $2.50 (Rs 130).
When I tried to get it at my local store in Delhi, for my dessert-making experiment, I had to pay more than double. Of course, cream cheese goes bad unless it is transported at very low temperatures. So, the cost of carting it across the world was likely to be high.
But the biggest reason for the difference in price was the very high tariff that India had imposed on dairy products like cream cheese.
In fact, unbeknownst to me, five years earlier, the US International Trade Commission had complained that not only did India levy very high tariffs on American farm produce but also had several ‘non-tariff measures’ (NTMs) in place to discourage agricultural imports.