The announcement was made after a brief emergency meeting here Friday morning. While it marks the deepest production cut since 2003, OPEC’s move failed to establish the price floor that members wanted. Oil fell as much as $5 a barrel by midday Friday and was trading below $65 in New York, down from $145 in July.

The cartel is not scheduled to meet again until Dec. 17 in Algeria, but OPEC’s president, Chakib Khelil, the Algerian oil minister, said “there will definitely be another cut” at that meeting or possibly earlier, if crude keeps falling.

“The fundamentals are not good,” Mr. Khelil said in an interview after the meeting. “This is a crisis situation.”

Before Friday’s session, experts had predicted the cartel would cut perhaps 1 million barrels a day, with Venezuela and Iran pushing for a bigger daily reduction of 2 million barrels while Saudi Arabia contemplated a smaller cut.

Meetings of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries have often been contentious, daylong affairs with fierce divisions between rivals like Saudi Arabia and Iran. But Mr. Khelil said this time, members quickly agreed on the 1.5-million-barrel reduction, which amounts to about 5 percent of OPEC’s output and nearly 2 percent of global oil consumption. It will take effect Nov. 1.

“I made my speech and it was agreed upon very quickly and everybody was on board,” Mr. Khelil said.

“They see the numbers,” he added, referring to what he said was a dramatic fall-off in demand from North America and Europe, in particular. Exporters, he said, are having trouble locating buyers for their crude, with some countries finding that normally reliable customers cannot obtain letters of credit to fund their purchases because of the financial crisis.

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