Sustainability in the diffusion of innovations: Smallholder nontraditional agro-exports in Guatemala

Since the late 1970s, Guatemala, like a number of other developing countries, has experienced an extraordinarily rapid growth in the production of nontraditional agro-expors (NTXs). In this article, decisions to adopt and withdraw from NTX cultivation at particular points in time are conceptualized as household decisions in a duration model that explains the number of years before eventually deciding to adopt and the number of years to remain in NTX production before eventually withdrawing. The study is based on a household survey conducted in 1994 in six rural communities serviced by the Cuatro Pinos cooperative in which adoption of NTXs had taken place to varying degrees and at different times. The analysis builds on previous research undertaken in the same villages in 1985 and 1991 by the International Food and Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) and the Institute of Nutrition of Central America and Panama (INCAP). The remainder of the article is organized as follows: in Sections II and III a household-choice model for the decisions to adopt and withdraw is developed, and a number of hypotheses regarding the determinants of these two decisions are derived; in Section IV, the survey methodology and descriptive statistics are presented; in Section V, duration models are presented; results from the estimation of duration models for adoption and withdrawal are presented in Section VI; Section VII reports conclusions and recommendations based on the findings.