Whether used to store leftovers, keep hospital equipment sterile, or insulate a home, plastics are unmatched for their adaptability, durability, and low cost.

But Mercosur, too, is essential to Latin America s global economic integration, owing largely to its core country, Brazil, whose international connections and influence are unmatched in the region.

And I cannot emphasize enough how grateful I am for the manner in which Chris Sanders, through his efforts in offering us a possible way forward through his subtle, informal, untabled derivation of the five Ambassadors' proposal, has underpinned a further intensification of the focus on finding a way through the CD's impasse.