The FAO Glossary on Organic Agriculture is available in English, French and Spanish, Arabic and Chinese. The Glossary contains 401 concepts with synonyms, variants, definitions, remarks and context fields where appropriate.
The concepts have been selected from FAO and international documents and publications on organic agriculture, as well as from the proceedings of meetings of experts discussing related issues, such as the International Conference on Organic Agriculture and Food Security which was held in May 2007.
FAO pays particular attention to enhance a common language and to standardize technical terminology for its meetings, documentation and publications. It also promotes standard best practices for terminology management and storage, facilitating growth, interoperability and exchange.
It should be noted that organic agriculture involves many disciplines and subdomains such as: certification, standards, accreditation, culture, food security, livestock, biodiversity, ecology, land use, processing, production, knowledge, tradition, agricultural inputs, etc. It has been necessary, therefore, to limit the selection of terms on the basis of those directly related to organic agriculture and to the most commonly used concepts in the domain.
The bibliographic references of both the concepts and their definitions are indicated in section 5 on Bibliographic Sources in the trilingual pdf document.
It is hoped that this Glossary will facilitate multilingual communication and documentation in FAO's long-term objective to enhance food security, rural livelihoods and economic resilience and environmental integrity by building capacities of member countries in organic production, processing, certification and marketing.
