DAVOS, 28 January 2006 — The oil market is adequately supplied, and there is no need for OPEC to increase production, OPEC President Edmund Daukoru of Nigeria said at the World Economics Forum here yesterday.
He said that the oil market “is well supplied” and that he did not think it was necessary for members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries to increase production.
OPEC oil ministers are to meet in Vienna on Tuesday to discuss production issues.
World oil prices rose by more than a dollar yesterday on supply concerns, analysts said.
New York’s main contract, light sweet crude for delivery in March, jumped $1.29 to $67.45 per barrel in pit trading.
In London, the price of Brent North Sea crude for March delivery gained $1.11 to $66.03 per barrel in electronic deals.
Meanwhile, trade powers began mapping out a route yesterday toward an elusive global free trade deal, with an end-April deadline looming and no sign of any narrowing of their differences.
Ministers from the United States, the European Union, Brazil, India, Australia and Japan met before a gathering of two dozen countries yesterday and this morning. Officials said the idea in Davos was not to argue over the details of a deal, which would cover farm and industrial goods, services and changes to the rules of world commerce, but instead to focus on how to handle the talks in the little time left.
“We have been reviewing the process going forward, the road map,” India’s Commerce and Industry Minister Kamal Nath told reporters after initial talks in this Swiss mountain resort.
US Trade Representative Rob Portman said the six trade powers planned to meet again in mid-March, although they could gather sooner to tackle aspects of the negotiations.
The World Trade Organization’s (WTO) Doha round of trade negotiations, launched over four years ago to boost economic growth and ease poverty, has already missed several deadlines.
The latest was in Hong Kong in December when ministers failed to reach a draft accord including all the difficult political decisions, such as how far to slash rich nation farm subsidies and open up their agricultural markets. They agreed a delay of four months, the first of which has now nearly passed with no apparent narrowing of the differences.
Negotiators say the ultimate deadline is mid-2007 when US President George W. Bush loses his power to sign trade deals without detail-by-detail approval by Congress. But to get the deal ready for that, it must be agreed this year.
EU Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson, under pressure from countries which strongly defend agriculture such as France, has said the United States and Brazil risk burying the round by insisting Europe must make a further farm offer. He has also warned that if Brussels walked away from the talks, it would lose nothing because countries like Brazil were giving nothing in areas of interest to the EU, such as more market access in industrial goods and services.
In another development, Britain, Nigeria and US software tycoon Bill Gates unveiled an ambitious $56 billion plan here yesterday to prevent 14 million tuberculosis deaths over the next decade.
Speaking at the launch at the Forum, Gates committed to tripling his own foundation’s funding against tuberculosis from $300 million to a total of $900 million by 2015.
“This is a very tough disease,” Gates told a press conference, underscoring the importance and global ambition of the new program. “I’m very excited to see it being created and I want to do everything I can to back it,” he added.
Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo, British Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown and Gates urged business and political leaders gathered here to back the new program.