The Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (Opec) has decided against reducing oil supplies despite concerns over the declining price of crude.Members of the 12-nation body meeting in the Austrian capital, Vienna, on Sunday said that production levels would remain the same until the group's next meeting in May.
"It's a rollover until May," Hussein al-Shahristani, Iraq's oil minister, said.
However, Opec members, who produce about 40 per cent of the world's crude, pledged to fully comply with dramatic output cuts announced last year.
Before the meeting, Ali Ibrahim al-Nuaimi, Saudi Arabia's oil minister, said that there was only an 80 per cent compliance level with the 2008 cuts - meaning that Opec still has yet to remove about 800,000 barrels per day of production from the market.