Latin America’s two most successful state-controlled oil firms, Brazil’s Petro-bras and Colombia’s Ecopetrol, are grap-pling to reconcile government controls on politically sensitive domestic fuel prices with their bottom lines. Both face a chal-lenge arising from a lack of sufficient refining capacity and surging demand. Petrobras has postponed a board meeting by one week to 29 November to discuss a proposed new fuel pricing methodology aimed at narrowing a gap between domestic and international prices that has caused the company huge downstream losses (WPA, 1 November, p7). Seasonal increases in product demand and a depreciation of the Brazil-ian real have exacerbated the disparity.
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