After the failure of the world trade talks in Seattle, a ministerial meeting of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (Unctad) in Bangkok has suddenly gained in importance. The BBC's economics correspondent Andrew Walker reports from the Thai capital.

Unctad is not normally a name to set the pulse racing.

The prospect of the organisation holding discussions for a whole week would numb the mind of all but the most committed trade policy nerd.

But the events in Seattle last December at the World Trade Organisation (WTO) meeting have changed all that. Thousands of protestors surrounded the conference centre, the UN Secretary General and the US Secretary of State cowered in their hotel rooms, unable to make their planned speeches at the opening ceremony.

There was violence on the streets of Seattle, and fiasco in the conference hall, as the WTO's member countries failed to do what they came to do - to launch a new round of trade liberalisation talks. It was essentially a split between rich countries and poor.

Many of the protestors are now here in Bangkok, promoting their anti-globalisation views.

The increasingly integrated market economy is driven by multinational business, they say, and it's bad for the developing countries. It exposes them to the vagaries of highly volatile capital markets.

Thailand, Unctad's host, was a prime example of that in 1997. The critics also say globalisation forces the poor countries to face competition from the multinationals.

Unctad's Secretary General, the Brazilian Reubens Ricupero, does accept that there is much wrong with the way globalisation has happened, that it needs to be tamed to enable the developing world to share fully in the benefits.

But unlike many of the protestors, he doesn't want to stop the process dead in its tracks.

And in the meeting there will be plenty of voices who want it to go ahead at full speed. Those people, the ministers from the rich countries, mostly regret the failure of the Seattle meeting of the WTO.

The Unctad meeting is not about completing that bit of unfinished business.

It is not a forum in which countries make binding commitments to remove trade barriers.

Nor is Unctad an organisation that has large amounts of money to dole out to the poor countries, as the World Bank, for example, does. It gives technical advice on trade; and acts as forum for discussing development issues.

The meeting is due to end with a statement about how to ensure the developing countries get the benefit of integrating themselves into the world economy.

Already, many of the lobbyists are worried that the statement will omit what they regard as key points, about the role of international factors, such as world commodity prices and the financial markets, in developing countries' economic problems.

They think the rich countries want to put the blame squarely on poor economic policies, weak business regulation and corruption in the developing countries themselves.

Whatever the outcome in Bangkok, millions of business deals will continue to advance the process of globalisation. The campaign against will also go on. For the antis the next stop will be Washington in April, the meetings of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.