OPEC's decision to maintain present allocations until the end of 1994 has been greeted with an immediate fall in prices of more than $1 a barrel.

The OPEC meeting in Geneva, which opened on 25 March, closed the following day after the organisation failed to reach agreement about how to deal with the crude oversupply.

Iranian Oil Minister Gholamreza Aqazadeh said that Saudi Arabia had opposed any decrease in production. Kuwait's Oil Minister Ali Ahmad al-Baghli said in an interview published by the London daily Al-Hayat that any production gap would have been made up by non-OPEC producers.

The meeting agreed to maintain the combined ceiling at 24.52 million barrels a day (b/d). This is the level agreed by OPEC for the six months ending 31 March 1994.