Ananova:

Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa, in his first public speech since his country's official re-entry into Opec, said the 13-nation oil producer group must take on a more political role and that current oil prices remain historically low.

Mr Correa said he joined his Venezuelan ally, president Hugo Chavez, in arguing for the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries to assume a more political role - a position that other members, including the group's de facto leader, Saudi Arabia, have clearly opposed.

"I agree completely," he told a news conference in the Saudi Arabian capital on the sidelines of OPEC's heads-of-state summit.

"OPEC needs a political vision to manage a strategic resource," Mr Correa said. It was "denying reality" to try to reduce OPEC to a purely technocratic role, he said.

Mr Correa did not directly back comments by Mr Chavez that 100 dollars a barrel is a "fair" price for oil, but said that current prices, when adjusted for inflation, still remained low.

"The price of oil is still lower than in the 1980s," he said.

The weakening of the US dollar has eroded the value of oil earnings for producers, and Iran and Venezuela have pushed for possible ways to counter that, such as an oil currency basket - a move Saudi Arabia opposed earlier this week.

"We have to trade (our oil) in a strong currency," Mr Correa said today, arguing that to do otherwise means that oil producing countries end up "transferring" the value of their oil to richer countries. He did not elaborate.

Mr Correa also said OPEC has the clout in the energy market to help co-ordinate a battle against global warming. He suggested an environmental tax could be imposed on richer, consumer nations that would help to advance alternative fuels and also "compensate" poorer, developing countries trying to industrialise.

Ecuador left OPEC in 1992 saying it could not afford to pay membership dues and disagreed over OPEC's production quotas at the time.