BRESSELMARK — Trade negotiations among 11 delegations collapsed Wednesday on their ninth day after the parties were unable to agree on what a trade is, according to the talks’ chair, who said the delegations had arrived with “fully incompatible understandings of the word in the title of the meeting.”
“We came here to trade. We are leaving without knowing whether we did,” said the chair, Ambassador Teodor Halm-Ressig, speaking from the lobby of the Grand Hotel Vellmark, where the talks were held in a ballroom that had been rearranged three times by Tuesday. Delegations were seated at a horseshoe-shaped table, which a delegation from the east protested on the first morning on the grounds that it had been placed at the part of the horseshoe that does not touch the horse.
The talks broke down over competing definitions. A delegation from the north held that a trade is an exchange of goods of equal value. A delegation from a large island nation held that a trade is an exchange in which it receives goods of greater value, and that the other kind is “a gift.” Two landlocked delegations held that a trade is a skilled occupation, such as plumbing, and spent the first four days attempting to negotiate the rate for a water heater. A delegation from the south, whose head of mission had been briefed by a member of staff who follows professional sports, arrived on the second day prepared to offer its deputy finance minister, a second-round pick, and “future considerations” in exchange for a starting central banker and cash.
By the sixth day, the delegations had begun trading words themselves. The island delegation traded “tariff” to the northern delegation for “duty” and two adjectives to be named later. Two delegations exchanged interpreters, plus a cash consideration, after which both interpreters declined to translate the word “trade” on the grounds that they had not been consulted. On Monday, the eastern delegation traded the main ballroom to the hotel for a smaller room with a view, and the final two days of talks were held in a stairwell, with delegations seated by floor. The coffee in the stairwell was rated “acceptable” by six delegations and “a step down” by five, a phrase the chair’s office later confirmed was not intended literally and was then forced to trade away.
The Department of Agricultural Common Sense sent an observer to the talks. Asked whether the department had a definition of trade, Ron Gilchrist, the department’s senior spokesperson, said the department “has long supported the exchange of soybeans for other soybeans, which is the soybean way.” He declined to comment further.
The draft final communiqué, a 64-page document, contains a 311-page glossary appended to it in which no word is defined. A single sentence, “The parties agree that something happened,” was approved on the eighth day by all 11 delegations, then withdrawn by four after a dispute over whether “something” had been traded for “anything.”
Halm-Ressig said the delegations would reconvene in the autumn once they had agreed on a definition of “reconvene.”
The only completed exchange of the nine days took place on Tuesday afternoon at the hotel gift shop, where a junior delegate from the north traded a 20-unit banknote for a commemorative mug. Both sides have since requested a review.