Keen to know what you're really eating and want to check personally? Duncan Graham reports from a West Java farm that welcomes visitors and urges inspection: If you're a hard-wired health-conscious foodie, then paying an extra 30 per cent for organic food can be a small price. But only if the product has been grown without pesticides and chemical fertilisers.

Who knows if the vegetables are really as described? They look the same as any other produce in the market, as red or green or yellow as the cheaper foods. Often they taste the same - though growers disagree.

Maybe corrupt or careless farmers have doused the leaves with toxic bug-killers. Perhaps they've saturated the soil with noxious products from heavy metal industrial plants. And, horror, horror, they've might even have used human waste, the so-called night soil. ("Nice looking fruit - funny smell, though.") Then the harvest has been stuffed in a pretty bag with a fancy label saying "organic".

Any ill effects aren't likely to be felt till long after the evening meal has been digested. Cancers grow slowly as the body accumulates poisons and take years to appear. By then you've long forgotten what you ate and where you shopped.

Just washing before cooking is no guarantee of safety. Plants ingest chemicals and build these into their leaf and root structure.

Certifying quality isn't just an Indonesian problem. Australian farmers have been jailed for selling wrongly labelled grains in a bid to get the higher prices that organic produce attracts. Their crimes have been discovered only after laboratory tests.

The Indonesian pioneer of organic farming has solved the problem with a three-pronged approach: His product is certified organic by an international agency (the National Association of Sustainable Agriculture Australia), his farm is open to the public and his name and face are on the packaging.

So if organic is your bag, look out for plastic wraps of veggies on your supermarket shelf with the trade mark Agatho. If these show a balding and bespectacled white-bearded bule looking organically robust then you should rest easy that what you read is what you get.

What the packaging doesn't say is that Agatho Elsener is a Catholic priest and that profit from his enterprise goes back into the community.

More than 20 years ago Pastor Agatho left Kalimantan where he'd been a missionary for two decades and moved to West Java. Although he knew little about horticulture he'd read books on organic farming and believed this could be one cure for a polluted planet and poor health.

Using money raised in his native Switzerland Pastor Agatho bought six hectares of sloping land at Cisarua outside Bogor. Here he set up a foundation - Bina Sarana Bakti. A three storey concrete building was erected with demonstration plots and lecture rooms. These are used to spread the word about the benefits of organic farming to growers and consumers.

Pastor Agatho, who has become an Indonesian citizen, is currently in Switzerland for eye treatment. Field manager Sudaryanto said farmers from many parts of Indonesia had attended courses at the farm and taken the concept of organics and sustainable farming back to their home villages.

None

West Java
East Java
Central Java