OPEC cares passionately about world energy as a whole and not just about petroleum. Cleaner, safer, and easier energy. Energy for development. Energy that can enrich the lives of even the world's poorest communities.

A key mandate of our Secretariat in Vienna, Austria, is to conduct research into all matters of world energy that relate to petroleum, and this also includes such topics as sustainable development, environmentalism, and world trade. This is to ensure that OPEC and its 11 Member Countries always have an up-to-the-minute understanding of the latest developments in the world energy industry, how these developments fit in with the objectives and the values of the Organization, and how they can best be articulated in an informed and constructive manner, in both oral and written form, to audiences of many different persuasions and agendas.

Our Member Countries span three continents and possess a rich blend of cultures, heritages, political institutions, economic and social systems, geophysical features, and other natural attributes. They consist of Algeria, Indonesia, the Islamic Republic of Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, the Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, Nigeria, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Venezuela. Despite their natural and understandable differences, these countries are united by their common desire to nurture their collective interest as oil-producing, developing sovereign states. Implicit in this is their commitment to ensuring order and stability in the international oil market, with reasonable prices, secure supply, and fair returns to investors. This is not just rhetoric.

While these objectives are enshrined in the OPEC Statute, which was adopted shortly after the Organization's establishment in 1960, they have a much more fundamental premise to them—they are sheer common sense. If OPEC wishes to shift its oil in the market in an effective and mutually beneficial manner, then, in the final analysis, it has to give the market what it wants. Here, "mutually" refers to the interests of producers and consumers. We all crave stability, fairness, consistency, and transparency. These are all qualities that lie at the heart of OPEC's stipulated and practiced objectives.

Of course, the critical words here are "give the market what it wants." In this context, other parameters emerge, including the nature of the market, time horizons, capabilities, attitudes, and regulation. In other words, what market are we talking about? Does it essentially consist of the established consumers and, increasingly, the newly industrializing states? What about the least-developed states? How do they fit into the conventional understanding of the world oil market? Time horizons introduce a further element for consideration, with the contrast between short-term and longer-term factors; this can be quite blatant in some areas. Then there are the onward march of technology, evolving political agendas, such as environmentalism, world trade and sustainable development, and the countless regulations and statutes that accompany these and other agendas. Viewed in this light, giving the market what it wants becomes a complex business, because one must first determine exactly what it is that the market wants.

Developing Strategies

But the issue extends even further than this. The special situation of oil-producing developing countries, particularly members of OPEC, accounts for the addition of three more dimensions to the notion of providing the market with what it wants: historical opportunism, Third World solidarity, and integrity assertion. These developing countries are living out a moment in history when they are well-endowed with a commodity, crude oil that is highly prized in the modern industrialized world. However, since crude oil is a finite resource and when viewed in an historical context, the countries' period of wealth is all too brief, they must ensure that every opportunity is taken to derive the maximum benefit from their crude oil reserves while they have them so that the export revenue they earn on world markets can be used to develop their economy and improve the welfare of their citizens in a sustainable manner.

At the same time, these countries are deeply aware of the plight of many other members of the developing world and have a strong sense of solidarity with them as they struggle to meet even the most basic day-to-day needs of their impoverished populations. Over the years, OPEC Member Countries have provided considerable assistance to these poorer states, on both a bilateral and multilateral basis, particularly through the OPEC Fund for International Development, which was set up in 1976 and has, to date, made total financial commitments of US$6.7 billion. Underlying this natural affinity toward the pressing interests of their neighbors in the South is the existence of local or regional relationships that stretch back centuries and even millennia, well before the birth of the modern petroleum industry. Such relationships, however much they might be prone to neighborly disputes, have a fundamental durability that is bonded by their geographical proximity and that is thus, for all intents and purposes, unbreakable. They will far outlast the petroleum era.

But, on top of all of this, OPEC has another long-standing hurdle to overcome concerning misperceptions about its integrity. The Organization was the central rallying point in its early years, especially the 1970s, as its Member Countries did the unthinkable and stood up to the world's established industrialized powers in asserting the sovereign rights of producing states to determine the destiny of their indigenous hydrocarbon resources. Their bold action was swept along by the tide of post-colonial history and has left scars that are, regrettably and unjustifiably, still apparent today in a global petroleum sector virtually unrecognizable from that of several decades ago.

OPEC and its Member Countries' efforts are still negatively colored by these events in many influential circles, hampering their ability to function with maximum effectiveness in the oil market—in spite of the fact that these countries possess nearly 80 percent of global proven crude oil reserves and nearly half of the natural gas reserves. The true picture of the market is distorted, so long as there exists this perpetual niggling pressure on its fundamentals.

While OPEC sees its basic role as being to support its 11 Member Countries as they seek to sell their oil and, increasingly, gas on world markets, OPEC also recognizes that this task exceeds simple commercial considerations and embodies such objectives as market stability, supply security, time horizons, sustainable development, and environmental harmony. This is very much the behavior of a mature, responsible Organization, and it has evolved over a period of more than four decades in which the oil market has experienced many ups and downs, sometimes of great magnitude.