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.

Intercropping is widely considered an effective strategy for increasing yields and economic returns per unit of land. However, its effect on household income remains insufficiently understood. From an income structure perspective, this study uses survey data from 1034 households in China’s primary maize-soybean producing areas and conceptualizes maize-soybean strip intercropping (MSSI) adoption in terms of adoption decision and adoption intensity to examine its impact on household income. The results indicate that although MSSI adoption reduces wage income, it increases agricultural operating income and transfer income, leading to a significant increase in total household income. Notably, this effect becomes insignificant when transfer income is excluded, highlighting the role of policy support. An inverted U-shaped relationship exists between adoption intensity and household income, with an optimal adoption ratio of 68.54%. Mechanism analysis shows that MSSI adoption influences income through the yield effect, factor allocation effect, and subsidy effect. Heterogeneity analysis demonstrates that income benefits vary by opportunity cost and income level. Specifically, MSSI adoption yields significant income-increasing effects for smallholders, full-time farmers and non-cash-crop farmers, exhibiting a distinct pro-poor effect. Therefore, to ensure income growth of MSSI adopters, the study suggests optimizing subsidies for MSSI, expanding local income opportunities, and improving intercropping practices.