Building resilience in smallholder-dominated, high-value perishable product (HVPP) systems requires going beyond technology-first approaches, which raise outputs while leaving farm incomes volatile. Drawing on fieldwork in Guangdong’s lychee sector (68 orchards and more than 20 processing and marketing entities from 2024 and 2025), this study demonstrates how pronounced supply swings and a compressed marketing window interact with fragmented producer organizations, asymmetric market access, and procyclical processing. These conditions form a self-reinforcing institutional–structural trap, where weak value chain governance and farmer residual claimancy distort technological upgrading toward short-term productivity, while inadequate buffering capacity prevents intertemporal adjustment. As a result, productivity-enhancing technologies may intensify market gluts, exacerbate price volatility, and worsen income instability, which is an outcome we refer to as the “technology amplification effect”, consistent with a broader productivity–volatility paradox. We develop an institutional–structural–technological framework that conceptualizes resilience as a hierarchical alignment of institutional, structural, and technological capacities and argue for sequenced interventions, namely governance reforms that rebalance risks and rewards and strengthen producer organization, followed by investment in countercyclical buffering infrastructure (processing, cold chains, and market diversification), creating an enabling ecosystem for technology to act as a resilience catalyst. The proposed pathway provides a transferable blueprint for building inclusive resilience in HVPP value chains facing concentrated supply and coordination failures.
Deng et al. (Thu,) studied this question.