Business people from Punta Arenas, in southern Chile, and from the Falkland Islands held 822 business meetings over two days, at an event the organisers described as a success.
The "Punta Arenas – The Islands Business Meeting" took place on Monday 28 and Tuesday 29 September at the Hotel Cabo de Hornos. It was organised by the Municipality of Punta Arenas and the Chilean shipping company Easter Island Naviera.
The event brought together some 60 companies from the Magallanes region and a delegation of 42 representatives from 32 companies and organisations in the archipelago, led by Louise Ellis, deputy managing director of the Falkland Islands Development Corporation. The sectors invited were food, cleaning products, cement, timber and spare parts.
According to the organisers, several business people closed contracts, though no number was given.
The meeting is a prelude to the reopening of a direct sea route between Punta Arenas and Stanley, which Easter Island Naviera plans to launch with a Chilean-flagged vessel between mid-November and the end of the year. Its general manager, Pablo Pacheco, described the service as a supply route "between private parties".
"It has been a good couple of days; we are on a journey to connect the past with the future. We have worked with Punta Arenas and Magallanes for many decades. It was interrupted recently, but we hope to work again with old and new friends," said Mike Summers, director of the Falkland Islands Chamber of Commerce and a former member of the Legislative Assembly. Ellis said there was interest on both sides in doing business.
The mayor of Punta Arenas, Claudio Radonich, said the city aims to become the islands' "big supermarket". The new route would compete with supplies that currently reach the islands from Montevideo.
The Chilean government has called the initiative "a business between private parties". Defence Minister Fernando Barros had said days earlier that Chile's support for Argentina's sovereignty claim does not imply restrictions on trade with the archipelago. According to the Chilean press, Argentina's foreign ministry followed the event closely; there was no official Argentine statement on it.
Set against the diplomatic care taken over the route, the commercial reporting of the event is strikingly exact in one place and silent everywhere else. The number of meetings is 822. The number of contracts is several.
This newspaper notes the asymmetry without complaint, since an audited figure is an audited figure. Over two days, 822 meetings were counted, verified and released. The contracts were counted by nobody and released as an adjective.
The arithmetic rewards attention. Forty-two islanders attended, which gives each of them 19.6 meetings across the two days, or very nearly ten a day. Spread across the 60 Magallanes companies in the room, the same total comes to 13.7 meetings each. Both groups were, by any reasonable standard, fully employed.
What the event therefore produced, to a confirmed quantity, was meetings. They are the output for which Punta Arenas has a figure, the output on which both delegations agree, and the only output that survived the two days in a form a reader can check.
Mayor Radonich's ambition can now be stated precisely. A supermarket is a place that holds a very large quantity of a thing and knows exactly how much of it there is, and on the evidence of September the stock is meetings.
The Department of Unnecessary Research looks forward to the first sailing in November, and asks only that the manifest be itemised to the same standard as the hotel. A vessel leaving Punta Arenas with 822 meetings aboard would be the best-documented cargo ever to cross to Stanley.