Venezuela Resists OPEC’s Call for Meeting

OPEC appeared to be floundering in its bid to call an emergency meeting to prop up sagging world oil markets after Venezuela’s oil minister, Erwin Arrieta, said he won’t attend. Arrieta said OPEC first needed a better analysis of what is happening in oil markets before calling an emergency meeting. Although many OPEC members are willing to control output by lowering oil production quotas, Venezuela, the group’s third-largest producer, has a policy of pumping as much as it can, leaving other members reluctant to shoulder the burden themselves. “The age of the quotas is finished, it’s over. . . . Just discussing it is stupid,” Arrieta told reporters at an energy conference in Miami. Members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries said they were concerned that without a clear agenda, talks would fail and cause more damage to stricken oil prices, which are hovering at four-year lows. Crude oil for April delivery was little changed at $15.32 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange.