DUBAI A cut in oil production of two million barrels per day will be ample to raise oil prices, oil expert Ahmed Zaki Yamani said Sunday. Yamani, a former Saudi oil minister who now heads an energy research center, told Qatari television that the mere announcement of the cuts on Friday pushed oil prices up by two dollars. If they do not respect the agreement, the price will collapse, which will greatly damage all the producing countries, he warned.

Oil producers held two top-level oil summits in the past few days in Saudi Arabia and the Netherlands, where producers from inside and outside the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) agreed to cuts of about two million barrels per day. The cuts by individual producers were not specified in the Hague meeting on Friday, pending further negotiations with other OPEC and non-OPEC countries ahead of the cartel's ministerial conference on March 23 in Vienna. However, Kuwaiti newspapers on Saturday said Saudi Arabia will account for a quarter of the cuts agreed at the Hague meeting, which also included OPEC members Algeria, Iran and Venezuela and non-OPEC producer Mexico. Saudi Arabia, the world's top oil producer is expected to cut output by around 500,000 bpd from its current quota of just over eight million bpd.

Crude lost more than 40 percent of its value in 1998, as OPEC repeatedly failed to enforce the agreed production limits, flooding the market with cheap oil. (AFP)