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The Director of WTS Ghana, a tax consulting firm, Mr Abdallah Ali-Nakyea, has challenged the Ministry of Food and Agriculture (MoFA) to come out with concrete plans and projects that could boost the modernisation of the agriculture sector as a priority area of the economy. Those measures, he said, were critical to ensure the efficient use of the $89.85 million oil revenue allocated for agricultural modernisation, an amount that represents 12.45 per cent oil revenue for various sectors this year. �The current allocation, an upward adjustment from the 7.5 per cent between 2011 and 2013, means that the sector minister must come out with plans and projects such as irrigation, modern drying of cocoa beans with the solar power to modernise the agric sector,� he stated. Mr Ali-Nakyea made the call when he spoke at an open forum on �Efficient utilisation of Ghana�s oil revenue� in Accra on Wednesday. The event, organised by the Institute of Financial and Economic Journalists (IFEJ), created a platform for petroleum experts and journalists to deliberate on how best the country�s oil revenue could efficiently be used. Agriculture backbone Mr Ali-Nakyea said agriculture would continue to remain the backbone of the economy and questioned what efforts were being made by the MoFA to ensure that the appropriate investments in irrigation, modern drying processes for crops such as cocoa beans with the use of solar technology were being made. The tax consultant said the allied firms in the oil industries offered huge employment opportunities and tendencies for the creation of many jobs unlike the upstream industry that offered little prospects. He, therefore, suggested the need for laws that would regulate the local content policy to ensure that �these allied jobs are safe and well equipped to create the necessary jobs and revenues.� Efficient law The CEO of African Centre for Energy Policy, Dr Mohammed Amin Adam, said the petroleum revenue management of the country was one of the best in the world as it satisfied the best global practices in the oil industry in terms of transparency and accountability and the expenditure of oil funds. However, he mentioned the lack of a law to address the efficient use of oil revenue as one major challenge facing the oil industry in Ghana. �We must recognise that we can have a transparent law on how to spend and publish revenue proceeds but it takes another law to ensure that oil revenue is spent efficiently. �We, therefore, need a legislation to address the efficiency spending of the oil funds in terms of how much is spent and where it is spent,� he stated