Japan decided Friday to demand a slower pace of growth of mandated rice imports in order to protect Japanese rice farmers from cheap imports, government officials said.

The decision was made at a meeting of trade-related Cabinet ministers ahead of the submission by members of the World Trade Organization of their proposals on trade in agriculture and services later this month.

In a trade accord that concluded the Uruguay Round of multilateral trade negotiations in 1993, Japan pledged to open its rice market to imports and committed itself to giving "minimum access" to foreign rice for six years beginning in 1995.

The Uruguay Round agreement obliged Japan to import 4 percent of domestic rice demand in 1995 and to gradually increase that amount to about 8 percent by 2000.

But Japan could be free of the minimum access requirement as Tokyo introduced a flat tariff of 351.17 yen per kg in April 1999 and cut it to 341 yen per kg in April 2000 in a move that allowed it to avoid boosting the minimum access level.

Japan is allowed to slow the pace of growth in mandated rice imports if it adopts tariffs before fiscal 2001.

At Friday's meeting, the Cabinet ministers reaffirmed Tokyo's position that a new round of trade liberalization talks under the WTO should be launched as soon as possible in 2001, the officials said.

They also repeated that the round's agenda should be wide-ranging, in addition to the mandated agriculture and services negotiations already under way, the officials said. The new WTO round was supposed to have begun early this year, but was delayed due to sharp differences among WTO members on what items should be on the agenda, especially concerning labor protection, the environment and antidumping rules.