The US Department of Agriculture listed Wakanda as a free-trade partner – despite it being a fictional country.
A USDA spokesperson said the Kingdom of Wakanda was added to the list by accident during a staff test.
The department’s online tariff tracker hosted a detailed list of goods the two nations apparently traded, including ducks, donkeys and dairy cows.
In the Marvel universe, Wakanda is the fictional East African home country of superhero Black Panther.
The fictional country was removed soon from the list after US media first queried it, prompting jokes that the countries had started a trade war.
The unusual listing was spotted by Francis Tseng, a New York-based software engineer who was looking up agricultural tariffs for a fellowship he was applying for.
He told Reuters news agency that, when he first saw Wakanda on the list, he got “very confused”: “[I] thought I misremembered the country from the movie and got it confused with something else.”
After the listing was removed, a USDA spokesman told the Washington Post that Wakanda’s listing was added as a test file for staff, and was never supposed to be public.
