By Giff Johnson
For Variety

MAJURO — In response to growing government and business complaints, the U.S. Postal Service is to reinstate certain mail services for the Marshall Islands and Federated States of Micronesia that were terminated nearly 18 months ago.
Leo Tudela, the USPS’s Honolulu-based manager for the Micronesian region, said action to reinstate insured and registered mail services as well as to fix problems with the two countries’ zip codes is being taken.
Tudela said Friday it could not be done overnight because of the US Postal Service’s large bureaucracy, but that within “four-to-six months” it will happen.
“I can assure you that we are not going to put this aside,” Tudela said.
“We’re very serious about it.”
Tudela said that the mail problems facing both the Marshall Islands and the Federated States of Micronesia “have been raised to senior levels of the (U.S.) government. We have direct instructions: fix it as soon as possible.”
As part of a new long-term agreement between the US and Marshall Islands and Federated States of Micronesia governments known as the Compact of Free Association, the U.S. changed these island countries from “domestic” to “international” postal designations, saying it was losing money on the service. Since the end of World War II, when the U.S. won the islands from Japan, both these western Pacific nations had enjoyed the full benefits of U.S. domestic rates, despite their distance from the U.S. and their independent political status which gained them United Nations membership in the early 1990s.
Since the postal change in January 2006, businesses in the Marshall Islands have complained that U.S. vendors will no longer mail products to them because the zip codes aren’t functional, and the government has sought to have insurance and registered services restored to prevent theft.
Reacting to a recent headline in the local newspaper that proclaimed “96960 no longer valid zip,” Tudela said, “It’s still valid but limited.”
“I guarantee that insurance and registered mail will be taken care of, and we’ll make the zip code work,” he said.
Tudela said that the reason it will take four-to-six months to address these problems is that the USPS has the largest information technology system in the world. “We have 35,000 post offices and another 30,000 contract stations,” he said. “It’s a big issue (to make changes in the system).”
In contrast to the Marshall Islands, where postal concerns have been vocally raised by numerous local businesses and the government, in the Federated States of Micronesia there “has hardly been any complaint,” Tudela said.