The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power

by Daniel Yergin

The new and very difficult problems of the developing countries put the oil exporters into an awkward, even embarrassing situation. After all, they, too, were developing countries, and they now proclaimed themselves as the vanguard of the “South,” the developing world, in its efforts to end the “exploitation” by the North, the industrial world. Their objective, they said, was to force a global redistribution of wealth from North to South. And, initially, other developing countries, thinking of their own commodity exports and overall prospects, loudly cheered OPEC’s victory and proclaimed their solidarity. And this was the time when “the new international order” was much discussed. But OPEC’s new prices constituted a huge setback for the rest of the developing world. Some oil exporters instituted their own lending and oil supply programs to aid other developing countries. But the main response of the exporters was to champion a broad “North-South dialogue” between developed and developing countries, and to insist on tying the oil prices to other development issues, with the stated aim of promoting that global redistribution of wealth.