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As the world's big oil exporters struggle to trim production enough to boost prices as demand plummets, Saudi Arabia has contended that $75 now represents a "fair price" for a barrel of oil. But OPEC may struggle to keep prices at any set level amid the current economic headwinds.

The cartel's 13 members, which supply more than 40% of daily world oil demand of about 86 million barrels, are already falling behind earlier pledges to trim exports as countries such as Iran and Venezuela try to keep revenue flowing amid a crash in commodity prices and demand in key markets such as the U.S. The price of crude oil has fallen more than 60% since its summer high, closing Friday at $54.43 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange.

OPEC members have been slow to comply with the production cut of 1.5 million barrels a day agreed to in October. The group's secretary general, Abdalla Salem El-Badri, told reporters that members had so far managed to remove only 850,000 to 1.2 million barrels a day from world oil markets.

The group's lack of discipline was one reason Saudi Arabia, OPEC's biggest producer, didn't push for another output cut in Cairo, even though the Saudi oil minister, Ali Naimi, argued that oil prices should be around $20 a barrel higher than they are now. Mr. Naimi's remarks represented an unusual departure for Saudi Arabia, which has long avoided the appearance of trying to set the price of oil. Saudi King Abdullah also used the $75-a-barrel price tag in an interview on Saturday with a Kuwaiti newspaper.