Opec left quotas unchanged last week, but $70 oil is high enough to produce stirrings of resource nationalism, which had earlier waned as oil prices slumped. Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Brazil’s president, has proposed rules that would give government-controlled Petrobras a privileged role in developing its vast “pre-salt” offshore reserves. Petrobras is meeting foreign oil companies to reassure them they will not be squeezed out.

Brazil has generally handled the financial crisis well. Its oil plans are nothing like the Venezuela- or Bolivia-style nationalisations, and should avoid the excesses of its fellow Bric, Russia. Brasília’s new rules will shift future projects from concessions, where companies own the oil and pay taxes and fees, to production-sharing agreements, where the government owns the oil and companies get a share of output. But existing contracts will be untouched – unlike in Russia, which sandbagged Shell into renegotiating a supposedly sacrosanct PSA at the Sakhalin-2 development. Yet there are similarities. Making Petrobras operator of all sub-salt areas echoes Moscow’s moves to reserve control of new offshore fields for state-controlled Rosneft and Gazprom . Such lack of competition can result in inefficiency, corruption and overstretch.