The Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry plans to press for a 4.6 percent increase in its fiscal 2003 budget in order to introduce a 1.04 trillion yen incentive program to boost the nation's birthrate, officials said Wednesday.

Health ministry officials outlined a 19.524 trillion yen budget request in a meeting Wednesday morning with the health, labor and welfare committee of the Liberal Democratic Party.

The proposed child-incentive program includes a 223.2 billion yen outlay to set up child-support programs across Japan, including the appointment of coordinators to oversee child-support programs at local governments.

The ministry also proposed setting up child-rearing support committees at all school districts in the nation.

To encourage fathers to play a larger role in child-care activities, the ministry advocated the establishment of a 500 million yen fund to support employers that promote paternal child-care leave.

Companies would get 1 million yen from the ministry to implement liberal child-care leave.

According to government statistics, the number of children born in Japan plunged to 1.18 million in 2001 from around 2 million a year in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

The ministry has also requested 11.6 billion yen to set up programs to develop human resources, including a 1.1 billion yen fund for a career-building support program for youths, 880 million yen for a vocational training program and a 9.3 billion yen fund for a program offering young people trial employment.

In addition, the ministry is seeking 330.2 billion yen for a program to start next April under which handicapped people would receive financial aid for support services of their choice.

Funds for food safety

The health ministry announced Wednesday it has lodged a fiscal 2003 budget request of 22.15 billion yen earmarked for the implementation of food safety measures, up by 60 percent from the initial budget for fiscal 2002.

The move comes in the wake of a string of recent food-related scandals, with some of the money earmarked to continue mad cow disease tests on domestic beef for another year.

The Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry also wants to use the funds to better address the kinds of cases that hit the nation this year, including the emergence of hazardous slimming aids and frozen spinach found to contain higher-than-permitted levels of pesticide residues.

Both products were imported mainly from China.

The ministry requested that the central government purchase diet aids and other supplements for component analysis tests to check if the products contain any substances banned in Japan.

This procedure would be conducted nationwide via local governments, the ministry said.

The ministry also wants to collate information on health damage caused by supplements and release it on the Internet.

According to a ministry tally, Chinese diet aids had been linked to at least four deaths in Japan as of Aug. 12, while about 700 people have reported that they became ill because of the slimming products.

To ensure the safety of imported food products, including frozen vegetables, the ministry wants to increase the number of food items subject to testing at port quarantine stations.

Regarding measures related the mad cow disease outbreak, the ministry plans to continue nationwide cattle inspections into fiscal 2003.

Under the inspection system, introduced in October following the discovery of the disease in domestic cattle the previous month, all cows slaughtered for meat processing must be tested for the bovine brain-wasting disease.