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OPEC’s 12 member states expressed “grave concern” that the world’s recovery from the current financial downturn will be slow and uncertain as they agreed to keep output steady when they met in Vienna yesterday.
“Since the market remains oversupplied and given the downside risks associated with the extremely fragile recovery, the conference once again agreed to leave current production levels unchanged for the time being,” OPEC said in a statement.
“While there are signs that economic recovery is on the way, there remained grave concern about the magnitude and pace of this recovery, especially in the major industrialised nations of the OECD,” it added.
OPEC secretary general Abdullah El-Badri said that the member states still had a lot of work to do for the remainder of the recession.
“We need to have more capacity, we need to add more oil to the market and we cannot do this without an adequate and reasonable price for oil for our member countries,” Badri is reported by AFP as saying.
“We are walking on a very thin line, we have to be very careful. We don’t want to take action that will jeopardise the recovery that we are seeing,” he added.
Oil is currently trading over US$71, a price most of the OPEC member states are satisfied with.
