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Sustainable access or unrestricted access?

Your excellences, Ladies and Gentlemen, before everything I want to thanks H E Abdullah Bin Hamad Al-Attiyah, the Minister of Energy and Industry of the State of Qatar and all the organizers of this event for the attentions and the hospitality given during the development of this Forum.

The title of this round of discussion, "Access to the Sustainable Energy ", has different meanings as one sees from the point of view of the producer or of the consumer. Thinking that this forum is a dialogue between these two points of view, I will permit to centre my intervention on two possible interpretations, always from the point of view of a producing country, and the consequences that, to our judgment, the above mentioned interpretations bear.

As producing country, to allow the access to the natural not renewable resources that they find in his subsoil must adjust to a group of principles, and not negotiable sovereign conditions, between which they are:

- To value the resource of a just way for the one who produces and reasonably for the one who consumes, considering that the current nominal price that the consumer pays, does not reflect the real value that the producer receives.

- To regulate the rate of exploitation of the not renewable resource, demanding that there is optimized the process of extraction and the assignment of areas, facilitating the conservation of the mentioned resource in benefit of future generations both of consuming countries and producers.

- To make understand to the consumers that the oil is not a commodity subject to the rules of free market, even more on a market riddled with extraordinary asymmetries and blemishes as the energy market. The oil is an exhaustible natural resource and therefore not renewable, for which the producing countries we must exercise the sovereign right to administer the rate of exploitation of the same one in benefit of the development of his own peoples and of the future generations.

  On the other hand, for a producer this principles, and as consequence his levels of production, is sustainable alone if there exists political, economic and particularly social stability. And this stability is alone possible in a climate of not intervention and of respect to the principles and sovereign decisions.

As consumer, it is good to ask: For whom is it the sustainability? For what? During the development of this forum and in similar others the question arises always: Are the industrialized countries using in an efficient way the energy that they consume?
 
The statistics demonstrate that between 70 % and 80 % of all the energy that is consumed in the planet it is concentrated in few countries by industrialized economies, million human beings have neither access nor economic any possibility of acceding to the basic means of subsistence, as the satellite photography demonstrates it used of fund during the installation of this forum yesterday, which shows an illuminated north and the south plunged in the darkness. 
 
There would be necessary to add that the existing reservations of hydrocarbons in the world are not sufficient to support, not only the enormous current consumption of the industrialized countries, but its projection of growth to future.
 
The current model of consumption of the energy is asymmetric, not only in the disproportionate distribution of the consumption, but worse yet, in the unjust form in which the increases in the price of oil affect to the poor not producing countries. Whereas it is difficult to demonstrate that an increase of ten dollars in the price of the crude oil has some effect on the industrialized economies, the statistics show that these increases have a devastating and retrograde effect in the minimal conditions of life of the inhabitants of poor countries. A really sustainable model must include policies of integration and solidarity that these asymmetries allow to relieve. 

Consciences of this responsibility, Venezuela has a program of supply of more than 200 thousand barrels / day in special conditions of financing to more than 20 countries of Latin America and the Caribe with the smallest and vulnerable economies.
In consequence, and to conclude, the unrestricted access to the energy is not the same thing that the sustainable access to the energy.

In the first case, the consumers demand access without restrictions to natural resources that ploughs the average only one of its owners to improve the social - economic conditions of their peoples. In this model, it is suggested besides the fact that they ploughs the own producers the causers of the necks of bottle in the infrastructure, product of decades of sub-investment; principally in the period in which the transnational ones had, exactly, I unrestricted access to the reservations.

In the second case, it is very clear that the sustainability of access must to refer also to the right that there have the settlers of poor countries of acceding to the energy. A model of sustainable access cannot base on an economic untenable model, for the voracious and inefficient of the consumption, the economic and social asymmetries, as well as the enormous damage that this one produces to the economies of other countries and to the environment.

Thank you very much.