significantly restricted following the management overhaul (560 members by 2004), _Cuatro Pinos’_ basic functions in terms of technical assistance, credit provision, and social services have been restored, signaling a potential reversal of the trends in the 1990s. _Cuatro Pinos_ is slowly moving away from its traditional emphasis on snow pea production, giving more importance to the production of French beans, whose prices has been subject to less fluctuation over time in comparison to snow peas. The cooperative also invested in a phytosanitary laboratory that allows for the fulfillment of export standards with ease and added new crops to its portfolio, including zucchini, baby carrots, yellow French beans, and radicchio. In addition to its members from the central highlands, _Cuatro Pinos_ is now engages in contract farming with non-member farmer groups from more remote locations in Guatemala.

3 REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE ON NTX PRODUCTION AND WELFARE CHANGES AT THE MICRO-LEVEL Available empirical studies on the NTX-household welfare nexus tend to focus on the _short-term_ implications of NTX production. Several articles from a diverse array of international settings have concluded that the _immediate_ impact of crop diversification into non-traditional export products on household income or consumption was positive (The Gambia: von Braun et. al., 1989b; Kenya: Kennedy and Cogill, 1989; Philippines: Bouis and Haddad, 1990; India: Birthal et. al., 2005).<sup>13</sup> In Guatemala, research efforts based on cross-sectional data collected in the mid-1980s and early 1990s have shown that _initially_ , the NTX boom led to increased land access among households that entered their lifecycles with the least amount of land (Barham et. al., 1995), and that NTX production substantially increased annual household consumption and income levels (von Braun et. al., 1989a; Katz, 1994). On the other hand, Immink and Alarcon (1993) report that in spite of substantial income differentials in favor of commercial crop production, growers of export vegetables or farmers engaged in the production of other cash crops were not generally better off than maize farmers in terms of adequacy of dietary energy and protein intake. Immink, Kennedy and Sibrian (1995) show that in comparison to traditional farm or off-farm orientation, being export orientated does not exert a statistically significant impact on child nutritional outcomes.<sup>14</sup> In the _medium-term_ , concerns about the sustainability of NTX production by smallholders were raised in the face of increasing institutional and marketing risks that surrounded resource-poor farmers with limited risk bearing ability (Carletto et. al., 1999). In particular, Carletto (2000) hints at the potential unsustainability of previous patterns of land accumulation in the _long-term_ by providing evidence for significantly lower rates of accumulation in the 1990s compared to the trends observed in the 1980s.

Moving beyond the studies on the _short-term_ impacts and _medium-term_ concerns related to NTX/snow pea production, empirical studies on the _long-term_ welfare effects of non-traditional

> 13 Potentially adverse effects of increased agricultural commercialization on household calorie consumption have been noted in various settings (Kenya: Kennedy, 1989; Rwanda: von Braun et. al., 1991).

> 14 It should be noted that with the exception of Katz (1994) and Carletto et. al. (1999), previous research on the impact of NTX production on various dimensions of household and child welfare in Guatemala did not expend any effort to account for the non-random nature of cooperative membership or NTX adoption.

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