Jean-Paul Forceville, the chief negotiator for France's La Poste, tells CNBC the probability is 'pretty high' that a compromise is reached this week to reform the 144 year-old organization along some of the lines the United States has proposed.
Negotiators from more than a hundred countries are working behind the scenes in Geneva, Switzerland, to keep a governing body over global mail intact.
The White House has been pushing to raise—or, in postal jargon, "self-declare"—the rate it charges other countries to deliver their packages. Peter Navarro, leading the White House delegation in Geneva, says that a higher barrier to entry would shift demand from cheap goods produced in and subsidized by China to higher-quality goods produced in the US.
The Trump administration's grievances center on one portion of the mail calculus called terminal dues - the negotiated rate a member government can charge another country when packages under 4.4 lbs arrive on its shores. On Tuesday, the UPU rejected the White House's preferred approach: Allowing all countries to set their own rates immediately.
For that reason, companies like eBay, Etsy, Amazon and Alibaba have raised concerns about the impact, either directly to White House officials or through industry groups. US officials would not share internal projections of where the White House believes prices would go, and prices negotiated between UPU countries are done so privately.with longtime FedEx lobbyist Jim Campbell in which Campbell suggested US terminal dues would rise 125% to 180%. Other estimates, according to industry executives like Law, suggest terminal dues could rise up to 600%.
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