The world is about to face an energy crisis because the demand for oil keeps growing even though production is already at its maximum, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said yesterday.
Chavez, whose country is the world’s fifth largest crude oil exporter, said that all OPEC members were “producing at full steam.”
“There’s a worldwide energy crisis around the corner,” Chavez told reporters at the end of the first Summit of South American-Arab Countries in Brazil.
“Especially because the US and other developed countries, but more so the US, have built a way of life based on the wasteful consumption of oil, which is non-renewable.”
Representatives of eight of the 11 OPEC members were present at the summit, which did not have energy on its official agenda.
“We are producing at maximum capacity,” he said, adding that non-OPEC members such as Russia and the US were doing the same.
Leaders and high-ranking government officials from 12 South American and 22 Arab countries ended the summit yesterday with a commitment for closer political and economic ties, while also staking out positions at odds with US policy on several fronts.
They rejected terrorism “in all its forms and manifestations,” but also called for an international forum to define terrorism, saying the current definition has been set by wealthy countries.
Jewish groups said another clause in the declaration encourages terrorism by defending the right of people “to resist foreign occupation.”
The summit document said that trade liberalisation talks promoted by developed nations like the US could benefit the global economy, but current rules of international commerce “widen the gap between developed and developing countries.”
Absent from the summit were some of the strongest voices in the Arab world, including the leaders of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Syria.
And Argentine President Nestor Kirchner jetted out the night before the summit ended in a move seen as a snub of Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.
Argentina and Brazil, the continent’s two largest economies, have historically jockeyed to be South America’s leading power. And Kirchner is reportedly upset with Silva’s insistence that Brazil – not Argentina – should get a permanent seat on the UN Security Council.
Kirchner did manage to get something of Argentine interest into the declaration: a call for Britain to hold negotiations with Argentina over the sovereignty of the disputed Falkland Islands.
Britain won a war with Argentina in 1982 after it invaded the islands, called the Islas Malvinas by the South American country.
