March 24, 2004. Montreal, Quebec. It's a cold spring day and over three hundred delegates are gathered in a windowless meeting room for the opening of an “extraordinary” meeting of the Montreal Protocol on Ozone Depleting Substances (ODS)— the first in its 17-year history. Although long heralded as the most successful of multilateral environmental agreements, parties to the Montreal Protocol had struggled at their meeting the previous November to reach an agreement on granting exemptions to a group of developed countries to continue using methyl bromide beyond its scheduled ban in 2005. Ultimately, this impasse was because the Technical Options Committee tasked with reviewing these exemptions had declined to rule on the validity of countries’ claims about the lack of alternatives. In preparation for this extraordinary session, parties had provided the Committee with revised guidance for its review of exemption applications. Yet, as the meeting is getting under way, in the sunlit atrium outside the heavy wooden doors, one of the Committee's expert members is setting up a table with a bountiful array of fresh vegetables, herbs, melons, pistachios and dried dates that were produced without methyl bromide. In doing so, she is literally setting the table for her objection to the Committee's recommendation to approve the bulk of the exemptions. The stakes are high: in places like the United States, exemptions would reverse a steady downward trajectory of use.