IT is said that a friend in a time of need is a friend indeed. This is the case of the United States in last week’s reaffirmation of friendship and engagement in the Caribbean.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton took the initiative to meet with the foreign ministers of the Caribbean in one of three stops in South America. She conceded that the US had been a friend but who had been absent. The outcome of the meeting was the “Commitment of Bridgetown statement on Partnership for Prosperity and Security”. This is a pledge to fulfill the “Bridgetown Accord” of “The Partnership for Prosperity and Security” which was signed by President Clinton and the Heads of Government of the Caribbean summit in Bridgetown on May 10, 1997. Mrs Clinton, who accompanied the president, obviously recalls that momentous agreement.

The accord was the product of several months of technical preparations and intensive negotiations led for the Caribbean on the security issues by David Simmonds, attorney-general of Barbados, and on the economic issues by Jamaican ambassador Richard Bernal. The major accomplishment was to establish the inextricable link between economic development and security.

The US preoccupation was with transnational crime and drug-trafficking and the Caribbean was focused on economic development. Because of this bifurcation of perspectives, the terse language on bananas was only settled less than 24 hours before the signing ceremony. For the US, bananas was a trade dispute but for the Caribbean it was a major economic issue with possible dire security implications.

There was little implementation of the accord, which was shelved by the Bush Administration and undermined by reallocating aid from the region to Iraq. It took the natural disaster in Haiti and a man-made disaster in Jamaica to bring the accord back to the front burner of US foreign policy after a 13-year hiatus. Hopefully this time it will come to a boil.

For many years the political leadership of the Caribbean has felt that the US was overlooking the region and that its involvement was episodic, prompted only by natural disasters on the scale of the recent earthquake in Haiti or coups in Honduras.

While we welcome the commitments made at the recently concluded Caribbean-US Dialogue on Security Co-operation in Washington on May 27, 2010, there is a sense that the US is still not fully appreciating the connection to economic development.

The renewal of the Caribbean Basin Initiative until 2020 stabilises the access to the US market for goods but the arrangement needs to be expanded to include services, investment and intellectual property rights.

Moreover, the accord needs to be updated to provide for development assistance, debt relief and balance of payments financing. This exercise needs to be completed by the end of the year because the small developing economies of the Caribbean are among the most vulnerable and most adversely affected by the global economic crisis.

Such a dialogue is not an opportunity for the well-practised art of mendicancy. The Caribbean must have a clear strategy for sustainable economic development including a timeline for ending its addiction to foreign aid. The Caribbean programme must involve fresh thinking on a new format for regionalism and must be politically pragmatic so that the US can see some mutuality of interests in supporting it.

The Almighty and the Mighty help those that help themselves.