Board of Governors would elect the Chairman and the Secretary-General. The organization is permanently seated in Vienna, where the Secretary-General is entrusted with numerous responsibilities in conjunction with his five departments: Technical, Administration, Legal, Economics, and Information. Today, OPEC has grown to include 11 countries, including some in Africa and Latin America.Prior to the implementation of OPEC, the oil market was ruled primarily by the major oil companies. For example, members of the infamous Seven Sisters, such as Gulf Oil and Standard Oil of California, were the main players in providing and exporting world oil during the first half of the 20th century. Prior to 1960, these multi-national oil companies controlled 92% of the oil production in the five countries that would initially form OPEC (Al-Otaiba, 13). These multi-national oil corporations would employ their own workers and transportation methods to export the oil which they obtained from the oil producing countries in the Middle East. However, the oil-producing countries would receive only a menial tax on each barrel that was produced, thereby giving a great profit-making advantage to the oil companies. When the oil companies attempted to lower the per-barrel prices in the late 1950s as they had been for years, the oil-producing countries in the Middle East feared that they would lose even more revenue on the taxes that they received. In turn, the Middle Eastern countries lost $4 billion in revenue from 1961-1970 (Al-Otaiba, 53). OPEC was established in direct opposition to the exploitive tendencies of the West, and to give power to the countries in the Middle East from which this oil derived. OPECs aspirations to restore price levels and avoid price fluctuations fueled their campaign in the 1960s to acquire and share knowledge of the oil industry to insure that the oil companies would never again obtain such a monopoly over the exportation of...
