The modern protest movement is looking to build global campaigns around more corporate targets as well as international financial institutions as it seeks to regain momentum after September 11.

Campaign leaders gathering in Porto Alegre for the World Social Forum said on Saturday that protesters should - and will - increasingly focus on large corporations.

John Cavanagh, director of the Washington-based Institute for Policy Studies and one of the critics of global capitalism who sits on the board of the International Forum on Globalization, said: "We need to shift some of our energy away from the key public institutions - the International Monetary Fund, World Bank and the World Trade Organisation - to the drivers of corporate-led globalisation: the corporations."

Buoyed by the collapse of Enron, which activists see as evidence of the failure of the markets and government to police corporate power, campaigners are planning more initiatives against single companies.

The anti-globalisation movement has previously trained its sights on many of the world's largest companies, including the oil giant Shell, the sports clothing company Nike and the fast-food giant McDonald's.

But the Bretton Woods institutions - the IMF, World Bank and WTO - have served as the rallying point for protesters from all over the world.

As public bodies with some sort of presence in every country in the world which promote what activists see as the 'Washington consensus' of free market liberalism, the international financial institutions have served as common cause.

With the escalating crisis in Argentina, campaigners against the international financial institutions claimed on Saturday that another country was suffering from the IMF medicine of budgetary discipline and devaluation. "Argentina is becoming a poster child for what is wrong with that model," Cavanagh said.

Campaigners are, therefore, planning to focus on Argentina as they renew their campaign for the abolition or fundamental reform of the World Bank and the IMF.

At the same time, though, activists encouraged more single-company campaigns. Greenpeace, one of the world's largest and most established environmental campaign groups, sought to rally support for its planned protests against the world's largest company: Exxon Mobil.

Gerd Leipold of Greenpeace International said: "It is sometimes a mistake just to go after the root causes ... There is such a wealth of corporate targets. Exxon is the biggest corporate target. It is going to be a tough nut and we will not be successful unless many of your organisations join in."

The meetings on a university campus in Porto Alegre, which hosts 1,500-2,000 people in each of the three main conference halls and thousands more people in the meeting rooms, impromptu cafes, bookstalls and outdoor markets of global justice literature and paraphernalia, are intended to help build such campaign coalitions.

In one session on Saturday which meandered across a huge range of environmental issues, leading campaigners considered a range of ways of approaching corporate reform.

Post-Enron, these include corporate rechartering, greater transparency of the international operations of US companies, an overhaul of the law governing auditors and consultants as well as more radical proposals to create government powers to dismantle corporations.

Vandana Shiva, one of the leading critics of corporate-led globalisation in India, sought to maintain the international movement's campaigning against Monsanto, the crops and agrochemical business.

One area of the anti-globalisation movement where there is no sense of lost momentum after September 11 is among the critics of genetically-modified crops.

Monsanto, one of the world's leading investors in GM products, has, therefore, become one of the movement's unifying corporate targets - and a company which activists believe has felt the power of the movement to obstruct corporate ambitions.

At a conference which may be similar to other conferences in its trouble with time-keeping, self-serving speakers and over-crowded coffee bars, the meetings in Porto Alegre are unusual for the tendency to break into unsolicited applause, cheering and wolf whistles.

Ms Shiva earned a great wave of noisy praise when she mocked corporate conventional wisdom and explained what women's contribution to the movement.

"No woman would bring up a child and say: 'This one is competitive and that one is inefficient. So let me invest in this one. You could not run a family by the logic of the market," she said. "The world we need to build needs to be built on women's ways."