Agro-export production and peasant land access: Examining the dynamic between adoption and accumulation

Abstract

New technologies and export opportunities have often contributed to dualistic agrarian structure and intense social conflict in Latin American. A switching regression model developed in this paper explicitly links export adoption and land accumulation patterns controlling for pre-existing differentiation processes. Applied to survey data gathered from peasant households in Guatemala, the model provides evidence of equitable structural change induced by a recent export boom in vegetable crops. However, the optimism of these results is tempered by consideration of the unfavorable longer term market dynamics confronting small-scale producers.