Your Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen. I would like to thank His Excelleny Abdullah Bin Hamad Al-Attiyah, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Energy and Industry for the warm hospitality and for making this forum possible today. It is an honor for us to be to attend this Ministerial Meeting, now in its sixth edition.

We believe it is remarkable the presence of such an important group of Ministers and Heads of Delegation in this meeting. We want to greet the presence of Bolivia, an important producer and exporter of gas in South America, now participating in this forum for the first time.

Our country (Venezuela), one of the main petroleum producing countries, and a founder member of OPEC, has an important base of gas reserves which has been used to supply our domestic market requirements and in a second stage we will export gas by pipelines and LNG.

The governments of South America have been actively working for an integration of energy. We have created named OPPEGASUR (as it was mentioned by the Bolivian minister) that includes the producing and exporting countries of gas and will be the enabling organism of policies and plans, aimed to a regional energy union. Although initially this institution consists of Bolivia, Argentina, and Venezuela, we are currently in talks for expansion and we hope to include other countries such as Peru and Trinidad and Tobago.

Excellencies, we hope that this Gas Exporting Countries Forum will evolve towards a superior level by not solely focusing on technical aspects, but also in the coordination of policies. It is this enforcement that opens the door to an organization similar to OPEC, which has the main objective of the coordination of policies in the matter of gas, as well as the determination to utilize the necessary mechanisms to safeguard our common interests.

The gas and petroleum producing countries should not have to resign our right to organize ourselves to defend our interests and to defend a fair value of a nonrenewable natural resource.  It is well known that the gas market imperfections have their own risks and that the powerful establishment will try to transfer those risks to producing countries. In this regard, it becomes necessary to study in depth the momentum to make this Organization possible. Venezuela supports the idea to create this institution and has the will to carry out any initiative that arises from this meeting with the purpose of creating the political and doctrinal platform, as well as the organizational structure on which the member countries could take action to defend a fair and reasonable value of gas. We are ready to work in that direction. We support the creation of a high level group to study that possibility and to make the appropriate coordination.

Finally, we would like to ratify the commitment of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela with the principles of this Forum. And we would like to recognize the permanent effort of the participating countries that have made these meetings possible.

Thank you for your kind attention.