To fill these lacunae, this study takes advantage of a unique panel dataset, which spans the period of 1985-2005, and employs difference-in-differences estimation to investigate the _long-term_ effect of snow pea adoption on changes in household consumption status and asset position in Santiago Sacatepéquez. The NTX of interest is snow pea given that from early on and during the 1990s, the crop emerged as the main product promoted and marketed by _Cuatro Pinos_ .

More than 20 years after the onset of the NTX boom in the area, the agricultural configuration and socio-economic make-up of the communities appear to have changed quite dramatically. Many farmers have succeeded in continuing to grow snow peas over the years, but many more have abandoned its cultivation. Others have entered snow pea production significantly later, with mixed success. Over 80 percent of the farmers in the sample adopted snow pea at some point, and the majority of ever-adopters adopted within the first few years of exposure, primarily due to the credit, technical assistance and marketing support provided by _Cuatro Pinos_ . By 1985, 62 percent of the sample, or close to three-quarters of ever-adopters, had already adopted. However, less than 40 percent of the early adopters have continued to produce snow peas over the past two decades. The vast majority grew snow peas only for a few years, and most had withdrawn from production by the mid 1990s. Given the heterogeneity in adoption patterns, it is impractical, and potentially misleading, to schematize the process into a dichotomy of adopters _vis a vis_ nonadopters. For this reason, we explore the heterogeneity of impact based on a classification of households that takes into account the timing and duration of snow pea adoption.

Our results show that while, on average, welfare levels have improved for all households irrespective of adoption status and duration, the extent of improvement varied across groups, with long-term adopters exhibiting the smallest increase in the lapse of two decades, in spite of some early gains. Conversely, early adopters that withdrew from NTX production after reaping the benefits of the boom period of the 1980s are found to have fared better and shown greater improvements in durable asset position and housing conditions than any other category.

The paper is organized as follows. Section 2 offers a brief history of _Cuatro Pinos_ and NTX production in the surveyed communities. Section 3 reviews the available literature on the impact of commercial crop cultivation on welfare. Section 4 describes the dataset and provides descriptive statistics. The empirical model and regression results are presented in sections 5 and 6, respectively. Section 7 concludes.

# 2 HISTORY OF _CUATRO PINOS_ AND AGRICULTURAL COMMERCIALIZATION IN SANTIAGO SACATEPEQUEZ

The primary institutional arrangement to shield smallholders in central highlands of Guatemala from various risks associated with NTX production was the establishment of the _Cuatro Pinos_ agricultural cooperative. _Cuatro Pinos_ was founded in 1979 with financial and technical assistance from a coalition of Swiss development organizations that initially arrived in Guatemala for the purpose of rebuilding ravaged villages following the 1976 earthquake (Saenz de Tejada, 2002). The cooperative was set out to provide field-level extension, input credit, and agricultural produce collection, processing, storage and marketing services for small holders engaged in the production of new export crops (von Braun et al., 1989a). From early on, snow 4