Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries Minister Tsutomu Takebe said Tuesday two of his top bureaucrats will step down in a personnel reshuffle apparently linked to the outbreak of mad cow disease.

Hideaki Kumazawa, an administrative vice minister, will resign Jan. 8 and Takemi Nagamura, head of the Livestock Industry Department, will retire the same day, Takebe said.

While Takebe acknowledged the responsibility of the entire ministry for the outbreak, he did not step down himself.

"A specific person is not to blame. The entire ministry, including myself, is at fault," he said.

Officials in the government and ruling coalition have been calling for Kumazawa's resignation since it was unveiled that he waited five years to ban meat-and-bone meal, which is suspected of causing the brain-wasting disease, formally called bovine spongiform encephalopathy.

In April 1996, as director of the former livestock industry bureau, Kumazawa instructed farmers to refrain from feeding the meal to cows but failed to ban its use despite repeated calls from experts. The World Health Organization had called for a total ban on meat-and-bone meal earlier in the year.

After becoming vice farm minister in January, Kumazawa handled the ministry's rejection in June of a report by the European Union, drafted at Japan's request, that warned of the risk of a mad cow disease outbreak hitting Japan. The first case was confirmed in September, followed by two more cases shortly thereafter.

Yoshiaki Watanabe, director general of the Fisheries Agency, will succeed Kumazawa, while Hiroyuki Kinoshita, director of the Rural Development Bureau, will take over Watanabe's post.

The personnel reshuffle will be endorsed Friday by the Cabinet, ministry officials said.

Human consumption of beef infected with BSE is thought to cause a new variant of the fatal Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a brain-wasting illness that has led to the deaths of more than 100 people in Europe.