Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez insisted Sunday that consumer nations must get used to paying “fair” prices for oil

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez insisted Sunday that consumer nations must get used to paying “fair” prices for oil, arguing that oil producers had been heavily exploited in the past. Meanwhile, OPEC Secretary-General Rilwanu Lukman cautioned industrialized nations against following the U.S. lead in releasing strategic oil reserves to counter high prices. A LEFT-LEANING former paratrooper, Chavez hosts a summit of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) this week at a time when crude oil prices are bubbling close to their highest level in a decade. But Chavez, who has emerged as one of the fiercest price hawks in the oil cartel, reiterated his belief that current prices were not high, but fair. “The thing is that for a century they (consumer nations) took millions of barrels of oil at giveaway prices, that’s part of the problem — they got into bad habits,” Chavez said in his weekly radio show “Hello President”. Referring to the oil cartel’s target price band, he added: “We’ve set a price of between $22 and $28 a barrel as a fair price for the moment, but we’ll have to adjust that as well in the future,” he said. OPEC, which controls two-thirds of world exports, has increased its quotas three times this year in an attempt to keep prices in a $22-$28 per barrel range. But the price has averaged $32.50 per barrel this month on fears the United States will run short of heating oil this winter.