The 3rd Regulation Forum of the Postal Union of the Americas, Spain and Portugal (UPAEP) was held last 20 April in the Uruguayan capital Montevideo, in the scope of the annual session of the Consultative and Executive Council (CEC) and chaired by Alfredo Pérez of the Argentine regulator, who also heads the UPAEP Regulation working group.
This third annual session of the Forum aimed to present the two regulation perspectives existing within the UPAEP: that of the European countries, which are undergoing the European Union's postal liberalisation project; and that of the Latin American countries, which are in some cases beginning to create their regulatory bodies and are taking their first steps in the regulatory experience.
The European perspective was presented by ANACOM, which covered the Postal Directive, the gradual liberalisation process and the existing dichotomy between the European and Latin American realities. The executive director of the recently-founded Ecuadorian regulator, Diego Téran, gave a presentation on the evolution of principles that led to creation of the Postal Agency and the accomplished progress.
Based on the questions raised, it was concluded at the following discussion that the Latin American countries' interest in the European experience did not so much concern the occasion to copy the European model, but rather the opportunity for orientation vis-à-vis some isolated questions in that model. For example, while in Europe the abolition of monopolies is promoted to move in the direction of liberalisation and total market openness to competition, with the ultimate goal of protecting the interests and needs of end users, in the Latin America region the emphasis is still on ways to protect the public operator from other private operators, curiously with the same goal of protecting customers and mail security. What happens is that as regulation (a regulatory framework that establishes rules for competition and equal opportunities for all operators) does not exist, there has been a proliferation of postal operators without the conditions to ensure minimum quality of service levels.
Speakers such as the Forum president and, after the closure, the UPAEP secretary general and counsellor stressed that the regulator and regulation are not necessarily just fiscal control figures, and that the idea is not to defend an abrupt cut with the realities of each country. It is rather the contrary, as Portugal demonstrated in the presentation on the European Postal Directive: a process to create a regulatory framework takes time and should be a gradual and controlled process. As also shown by Ecuador's experience, it is not useful to abruptly eliminate a postal operator's monopoly without more regulation to help that process along, because otherwise it facilitates the proliferation of small operators who weaken the entire postal sector as they are unable to maintain the public operator’s quality level.
Ahead of the 21st UPAEP Congress scheduled for August 2009, all the countries agreed on the need to keep this formula for postal regulation forums. It was recognised that only five years had passed since plans to organise such discussions were first aired in 2004, and that many ideas previously considered taboo or badly conceived have been overcome and that many countries in the region have since created regulatory bodies or are in the process of approving laws that will create them.
