Yar'Adua Charges Opec On Oil Challenges

President Umaru Musa Yar'Adua has charged the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) to ensure that OPEC remains focused and steadfast in realising its noble goals and objectives.

Yar'Adua said this yesterday in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia at the third OPEC Summit of Heads of State.While commending the efforts made by the Saudi Authorities to host the summit, the President recalled the relentless efforts of President Hufo Chavez of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, in the run-up to the Second OPEC Summit in Caracas in 2000.

"Reflecting on those great efforts, and considering them alongside the indefatigable manner in which His Majesty King Abdullah ibn Abdulaziz Al-Saud and the Saudi authorities have organised this third summit, rekindles our hope and confidence in the continued success of our organization, in the face of the rising global challenges", he said.

Continuing, he said the member countries "expect oil-consuming nations to recognise and reciprocate our longstanding efforts to ensure that the global oil market is adequately supplied with crude at all times, at reasonable prices.

In this respect, Your Excellencies, it is up to us to intensify our efforts to reach out and ensure that we are better understood in the global arena".

The President said in recent years, international concern about the environment has heightened, and climate change has been promoted to the centre-stage of global discourse.


"OPEC, as an Organisation, and our member countries, as individual sovereign states, have, to varying degrees, internalised the ideals of ensuring a clean and safe environment. We have, indeed, participated actively in all the negotiations of the United Nations' Framework Convention on Climate Change and its offspring, the Kyoto Protocol.

"However, we must never lose sight of the fact that we, the developing countries of the world, are marginal contributors to the historic greenhouse gas concentrations that are responsible for climate change today. Even as we continue to support the policies and programmes that should lead to a reduction of greenhouse gases in the future, we must examine the adverse effects on the developing countries of both climate change itself and the response measures of the rich industrialised nations. I include here those developing countries, which rely on hydrocarbon revenues for the wellbeing of their peoples."We, therefore, resist any form of global mechanism which, in a discriminatory manner, focuses on the search for alternatives to oil, to the detriment of oil-producing and oil-exporting nations. We must never lose sight of the fact that oil is a strategic natural resource of our member countries and that it has served mankind well, especially in the industrialised world, since the birth of modern petroleum industry a century and a half ago."We urge member states, in continued collaboration with other developing countries, under the umbrella of the G-77 plus China, to maintain a united front on the eve of the forthcoming UN climate change talks, which are taking place in an OPEC member country, at Bali, Indonesia. The negotiations for the post-Kyoto Protocol will begin there in earnest.

The Framework Convention's core principle of 'common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities' will continue to guide our negotiations with the industrialized countries."If we intend to optimize the benefits of our respective countries from our Membership of OPEC, it would be wise to engender closer cooperation in the economic, technical, educational, scientific and trade matters. The advantages, that can be gained from such policies and programmes, are too numerous to mention, and the Secretariat should, accordingly, be assigned to look into this matter more closely and report its findings to the Ministerial Committee", he said.Yar'Adua expressed hope that, at the end of the summit, the ideals of the organisation's founders, as well as the statements embodied in the solemn declarations, will be pursued with great vigour. "I also should like to see an OPEC which, once again, shows more unanimity and less ambiguity in promoting its noble ideals. And furthermore, I wish to see an OPEC which will continue to pursue its avowed commitment to ensuring a stable global oil market, being a partner in the technological advancement, while protecting the strategic interests of its Member Countries, the oil-consuming nations and investors alike.He said the successful hosting of the summit will be viewed by historians as a landmark event in the development of the organisation, especially since it is being held at a time of much change within the industry at large, when there is bigger need than ever to reassess our vision of the future.
Source: http://www.thisdayonline.com/