Wakanda, the fictional home of Marvel superhero Black Panther, was briefly listed as an official free trade partner of the United States.
The imaginary country, which in the Marvel universe is in east Africa, appeared in a list of selectable countries on a tariff tracker on the US Department of Agriculture’s website.
Wakanda is listed as a US free trade partner on the USDA website?? pic.twitter.com/xcq1OFTIPh
— Francis Tseng (@frnsys) December 18, 2019
The error was spotted by Francis Tseng, a software engineer, who tweeted about his discovery on Wednesday.
He tweeted: “Wakanda is listed as a US free trade partner on the USDA website??”
He later added: “fwiw (for what it’s worth) the US would no doubt try to liberalize Wakanda’s markets and flood it with cheap subsidized corn”
The error on the website has since been rectified, with a spokesman for the department explaining the addition was made during site testing.
Mike Illenberg told NBC: “Over the past few weeks, the foreign agricultural service staff who maintain the tariff tracker have been using test files to ensure that the system is running properly.
“The Wakanda information should have been removed after testing and has now been taken down.”
Having appeared in the Marvel comic books, the state of Wakanda burst into the public consciousness as the setting for last year’s critically and commercially successful Black Panther movie.
In the film, the nation uses advanced technology to keep itself isolated from the rest of the world.