between agents, the adoption of capital-intensive, high-risk, high-reward crop technologies among smallholders may be constrained due to their limited risk-bearing ability, access to credit, asset position, and level of human capital and management skills (Carter and Barham, 1996). Even in rare cases in which adoption is more inclusive of the poor in the short-term, cumulative risks materializing in the production and marketing of NTXs may not favor the more vulnerable in the medium- and long-term.

A well-studied experience that, at least initially, appeared to overcome various obstacles to NTX adoption is the diffusion of snow pea cultivation among smallholder members of the _Cuatro Pinos_ agricultural cooperative in Guatemala’s Santiago Sacatepéquez municipality, whose wellknown problems of poverty and malnutrition<sup>3</sup> , proximity to Guatemala city and location along the Pan American Highway featured it as a suitable candidate for increased commercialization to take effect and facilitate improvements in living standards. Thanks to strong foreign demand for NTXs and extensive financial and technical support provided by the cooperative, the area under investigation experienced a significant boom in NTX production in the 1980s. Snow pea cultivation, at the onset, translated into substantial improvements in consumption levels and noteworthy positive spillovers in staple food production among adopters (von Braun et al, 1989a). However, throughout the 1990s, a wide range of agronomic, market-based, and institutional problems led to a significant drop in the profitability of snow pea production and caused a sizeable number of smaller and resource-poor farmers to withdraw from export crop production. These problems included the severe decline in the availability and quality of services offered by _Cuatro Pinos_ due to pervasive management problems, reduction in soil quality due to land and agrochemical overuse, upsurge in pesticide resistance, rising input costs, detention of snow pea shipments at U.S. ports due to unauthorized pesticide residues, ensuing import bans, and the imposition of more stringent quality standards (Carletto et. al., 1999).

While the immediate/short-term effects of NTX/snow pea adoption and medium-term problems in the 1990s have been documented, empirical studies that systematically measure the extent to which cash crop adoption has impacted the welfare of smallholders in the long-term are virtually non-existent. Given the arguments, and continued effort, in favor of increased agricultural commercialization and NTX adoption in developing countries, the estimation of _long-term_ welfare effects of NTX production maintains its policy-relevance. This is especially true in Guatemala, where the national poverty rate stood at 51 percent in 2006 and 72 percent of the country’s poor were living in rural areas (World Bank, 2009). Despite exhibiting poverty rates below the national average, at 49 percent in 2000 (SEGEPLAN, 2005), poverty in the area remains widespread, and malnutrition levels particularly high. As 87 percent of the rural Guatemalan poor are estimated to depend on agriculture either as subsistence farmers or agricultural day laborers, it is important to assess the long-term viability of development strategies, including crop diversification into high-value non-traditional export crops that are aimed at fostering pro-poor agricultural growth. Furthermore, despite the inconsistent performance of _Cuatro Pinos_ over time, its longevity makes it a unique case in the literature, warranting a closer investigation to put observed changes associated with NTX adoption in a historical and institutional perspective.

> 3 In Santa Maria Cauque, one of the communities under study, a cohort analysis between 1964 and 1969 indicated that 13 percent of 1-year-old children, 27 percent of 2-year-old children, and 9 percent of 3-year-old children were affected by protein calorie malnutrition (von Braun et. al. 1989a).

3