Hello and welcome to the witness history podcast from the BBC World Service. Today, Alex

Last is taking us back to 1973 and the oil crisis which shocked the world.

I know that we are cheated. All the oil producing countries know that they are cheated. Otherwise

you would not have had this come in front. In the early 1970s the world witnessed a struggle

for the control of oil. The people from the Arab world are talking about tripling the

price or keeping it all to themselves. You know it wouldn't really be in their long term

interests. I would guess they will come to see this. The era of a very cheap source of

energy is done and this is a new era. Now don't expect the producers to accept something

much below than what the market forces will indicate for their oil.

For much of the 20th century the global oil industry had been dominated by a cartel of seven

major Western oil companies known as the Seven Sisters who between them controlled some 85%

of the world's oil reserves. They set the price and they kept it low. But from the 1950s oil

producing nations began to demand a greater say in fixing the price of their own oil control

of its production and a greater share in the profits. In 1960 Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq,

Kuwait and Venezuela formed OPEC to push their demands. Other countries soon joined.

I was against the old system that was not fair to the interests of the oil producing countries

as oil was very cheap. In 1973 Dr. Fadil Chalabi was Iraq's permanent undersecretary for oil.

Effectively the man in charge of Iraq's newly nationalized oil industry. OPEC decided about adopting

a new approach to the oil industry. Oil producing countries should take the initiative of fixing

the price instead of the oil companies. The Seven Sisters does. By 1973 OPEC had won some

concessions from the oil companies, but demand for oil in Western Europe, the US and Japan

was soaring and production was near capacity. At an OPEC meeting that year Dr. Chalabi proposed

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