Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who travels to the Gulf at the weekend, said the International Monetary Fund's current 250-billion-dollar bail-out fund was not enough and called for it to be extended rapidly to help countries in need.

Proposing a new IMF funding arrangement, he said it "would draw on the resources of those countries with substantial reserves, in order to bolster the resources available to those countries in need of (IMF) support."

Brown is due to leave for the Gulf on Saturday and is expected to raise his proposals with leaders there.

"It's the countries that have got substantial reserves, the oil-rich countries and others who are going to be the biggest contributors to this fund," he said, adding: "China also has very substantial reserves."

"There's a number of countries that actually can do quite a lot in the immediate future to make sure that the international community has sufficient reserves" to help crisis-hit countries, he said.

"What I'm clear is, that the (IMF) fund we have is not enough. We've got to extend it."

But Brown's call risked getting a cool reception in the Gulf. OPEC Secretary General Abdalla Salem El-Badri said Tuesday that the oil-producing cartel could not be expected to bail out the world.

"What is surprising me is everybody looking at OPEC to bail out this crisis. In OPEC, we are most of us very poor countries, we cannot bail out this crisis," he told an industry conference in London.

"This crisis created in the States must be solved within the States, they are capable of doing it," he added at the Oil and Money conference.

Brown said he had discussed his proposals in the last few days with IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn, as well as French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

"We have seen in recent days the financial crisis spreading to other countries -- middle-income countries, Eastern European countries. Capital flight has made a number of countries potential victims of this crisis," he said.

"So in the last few days I have discussed the risk of contagion and the need to stabilise economies right across Eastern Europe."

He added: "It is clear that the whole of the international community must have an interest in stopping this contagion, to prevent the worsening of the global economic downturn."

Brown was travelling later Monday to Paris for talks with France's President Sarkozy, who currently holds the rotating presidency of the 27-country European Union.

Asked if Britain would contribute to the enhanced IMF fund, Brown said: "We don't rule out anything in this, because everybody has got to play their part in helping.

"But I think that, as happened in the '70s, the big surplus countries -- those that have got big reserves -- are in a position to help most and we will be urging them to do so."

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