World Trade Organisation (WTO) officials and diplomats return to work next week, but with little hope that the derailed effort to initiate a new global round of liberalisation talks could be back on track soon.

Following the collapse of the ministerial conference in Seattle in December, called to start the negotiations, the general feeling is that little can really be done until the next US president is in place in just over a year.

Although talks on the further opening up of service industries such as banking and insurance, and on reducing barriers to freer world trade in farm produce, are set to begin this month, diplomats said they were likely to move very slowly.

The Seattle talks collapsed largely because of anger among the developing countries - which make up the overwhelming majority of the WTO's 135 member-states - about what they saw as an effort by some big powers to railroad them into new accords.

They argued that nothing was being offered to them in return for the huge reforms they undertook as a result of the previous negotiations, the wide-ranging 1986-93 Uruguay round.

Envoys from emerging economies and poorer countries at the meeting were also infuriated by the endorsement by President Clinton of many of the demands of anti-WTO protesters in Seattle and of the trade agenda of US labour unions.

Although the protesters seemed to think they were fighting the Third World cause, many developing country negotiators saw the demonstrations as yet another attempt to make them accept First World views on the environment and labour conditions.

"In many ways, those misguided and self-righteous people hardened us in our determination not to be pushed around by anyone," said an African envoy in Seattle.

These attitudes, already forged in a year-long pre-ministerial battle over the appointment of a WTO director-general and strengthened by months of scrapping over the agenda for a new round, are bound to dominate in the coming months, diplomats say.

In this light, they say, the top-level February gathering in Bangkok of member countries of the United Nations trade and development agency, UNCTAD, will be of key importance in formulating the agenda for the world's less rich states.

Although the four-yearly summit of UNCTAD, the 36-year-old standing UN Conference on Trade and Development, cannot take binding decisions (unlike key meetings of the WTO), its deliberations are basic to developing country cohesion.