A/HRC/31/51 crisis of agricultural biodiversity, for ensuring sustainable livelihood solutions for food security, and for empowering women with a sustainable livelihood. 36 35. Globally, women have bred more than 7,000 species of crops. 37 In India alone, seed saving has enabled women to breed 200,000 varieties of rice. 38 Biodiversity offers the genetic variation necessary to protect against diseases, pests, and weather events that threaten to wipe out food supplies. 36. Meanwhile, global agribusiness and biotechnology corporations have transformed the global commercial seed market into a multi-billion dollar industry39 and four companies alone account for 50% of this market.40 With such lucrative monopolies at stake, these international corporations have actively exercised the IPR regime to secure exclusive access to, and thus royalties from, patented seeds. 37. As a result of IPR laws, seeds that would have once been saved and shared are now the intellectual property of corporations. Recent litigation demonstrates that corporations are willing to appeal to the law to protect their property. Since 1997, Monsanto reports that it has filed 147 lawsuits against those farmers who failed to “honor this agreement,” i.e. Monsanto’s intellectual property rights. 41 38. The fact that 73% of the world’s seed supply is owned and patented by these corporations and are therefore non-renewable42, presents women with a major dilemma being. They are accustomed to seed saving and sharing, and would have o chose between discontinuing the traditional practice of saving and exchanging seeds or risk punishment for an intellectual property crime. IV. Economic barriers A. Changing global economic policy and the rise of corporate models of agriculture 39. Non-corporate agricultural producers, and particularly women, have suffered from evolution in agricultural policy and economic trends over the past several decades. The devastating structural adjustment policies imposed throughout much of the developing world in the past decades, largely as a precondition of receiving development assistance or joining the global trade regime, have resulted in an overall loss in agricultural productivity, decreased yields, and increasingly precarious rural livelihoods. 43 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 10 F. Akhter, Reflections on Empowerment, in Seeds of Movements: On Women’s Issues in Bangladesh, Dhaka: Naringrantha Prabartana, (F. Akhter ed., 2007); Vandana Shiva, Day 3: Seeds in Women’s Hands, OXFAM Int’l GROW Blog Channel, (Nov. 21, 2012) https://blogs.oxfam.org/en/blogs/seeds-in-womens-hands id. ETC Group, Putting the Cartel Before the Horse…and Farm, Seeds, Soil, Peasants, Etc.: Who Will Control Agricultural Inputs, 2013 No. 111 (2013) at 7. Op.Cit. Why Does Monsanto Sue Farmers Who Save Seeds? Monsanto http://www.monsanto.com/newsviews/pages/why-does-monsanto-sue-farmers-who-save-seeds.aspx Vandana Shiva, Day 3: Seeds in Women’s Hands, Oxfam Int’l grow blog channel, (Nov. 21, 2012) https://blogs.oxfam.org/en/blogs/seeds-in-womens-hands; FAO “The State of Food and Agriculture Women In Agriculture – Closing the Gender Gap for Development”, 2011, p 13.