“…Nevertheless, it is also clear that participation in such strategies is limited, and made possible by land and agroclimatic endowments and, most likely, local economic conditions (see for example Saavedra & Rello, 2013). While the threshold for deriving a primary income from maize is high, it does not mean that smallholders are not continuing to derive some income from maize sales, or continue to produce some maize surplus: elsewhere we have shown that in the Chiapas and Mexico case studies, a substantial proportion of households (even with land areas that imply only subsistence production capacity) continue to sell maize in small quantities through local informal transactions (Eakin, Perales et al, 2014), an observation that is corroborated by others (Baker, 2008;Keleman, Rañ o et al, 2009;Lerner et al, 2013). Nevertheless, the more informal local markets to which farmers turn to sell their harvests do not appear to offer the stability or security of income needed for farmers to rely on this as a primary income source, irrespective of production volume.…”