The International Energy Agency, or IEA, will this week discuss at a governor's board meeting whether to tap strategic stockpiles of crude oil against a backdrop of continued political turmoil across the Middle East , the agency's head said Tuesday.

The IEA's members are so far undecided on whether they will need to tap emergency stocks in light of production outages in Libya , said Nobuo Tanaka in an interview with Dow Jones Newswires. The IEA represents the governments of developed economies.

Tanaka spoke on the sidelines of a major gathering here between producers and consumers.

The IEA, OPEC, and top oil exporter Saudi Arabia had reached agreement prior to Tuesday's gathering that producers should tap into surplus production capacity in case oil supply from Libya was disrupted. But IEA members had "mixed" feelings about tapping emergency stockpiles held in consuming countries, Tanaka said.

"For the sake of disruption, there's a quite clear common interest," Tanaka said.

"Under a very tightened market, even a very small disruption could trigger a very big price hike. If that's the case, should we be more flexible or more proactive in using stockpiles or not? This is an interesting question for our members," he said.

"We have to be cautious, not to trigger by ourselves the crisis," he said, adding that there is plenty of oil in the market and the IEA's position was to "stand by as necessary" while closely watching the situation in Libya .

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