The former president of Tokyo Grain Exchange (TGE), which was merged to Tokyo Commodity Exchange (TOCOM), a subsidiary of JPX　now, in 2012, Yoshiaki Watanabe who was the president from 2007 to 2011 attended the forth rice industry symposium held by Agricultural Policy Research Committee, Inc. on February 3 and mentioned “All rice markets including physical, forward and futures should be done at one exchange”. Furthermore, he introduced how Chicago commodity futures markets have been utilized for the grain international trade, and so on.　After he retired from the administrative vice-minister of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (MAFF) and moved to the futures industry, and he was one of the founders of the rice futures markets in Japan.

At the symposium, rice related attendees including rice producers and the like appealed necessity for rice market one after another.
Its theme was “Is a rice market necessary？”and a rice wholesaler, a dealer managing a website for tenders on agricultural products and a former director-general of MAFF gave a lecture in a symposium format.
Not only the lecturers, but also attendees such as rice producers, actual users and the like took a microphone aggressively and stated necessity for rice market with emphasis.
Mr. Watanabe was not a lecturer, but mentioned on rice market because the chairperson held out a microphone to him. He put stress on not only rice futures market, but also three markets including physical and forward markets.
Also, he listed eight items on market function: collection including divided collection, pricing, supply-demand adjustment, tentative storage, insurance, finance, information and others (processing, transportation, asset management, etc.) and pointed out “On the eight items, if three markets share work to play a role respectively, ideal market environment will be built ゛.
On rice. MAFF is going ahead with the establishment of a physical market taking the initiative, but the futures market, which had been listed on Osaka Dojima Exchange (ODEX) on a trial basis, was disapproved in August, 2021, so its re-opening is extremely difficult.
In China, Dalian Commodity Exchange (DCE) has already set up the rice futures market in August, 2019 and in 2021, its rice futures volume was nearly fifty times higher than the volume of Osaka Dojima Exchange.

（Futures Tribune・issued February 7, 2023・no.3195）