Drought slashed production of durum wheat, the key ingredient for pasta, in Sicily and Sardinia and hit fruit and vegetable crops for a second straight year, farmers said.

"The current drought is even worse than last year," Arcangelo Lobianco, president of the Association for Land Reclamation, Irrigation and Land Improvement (Anbi), told Reuters on the sidelines of Anbi's annual meeting.

"The situation is tragic in the south."

He estimated that the government needed to invest some 7.7 billion euros ($7.59 billion) over the next decade to modernise irrigation.

Many irrigation canals and reservoirs were not efficient, and many networks in northern Italy have been wrecked by heavy flooding between September and November 2000.

Lobianco also warned that the south of Italy was not the only region facing drought as central regions had little snow during the winter and so less ice melted into the rivers.

Many reservoirs in southern Italy are almost dry.

According to Anbi, the volume of water in Sicilian and Sardinian reservoirs dropped sharply over the past decade, and markedly over the past three years as droughts intensified.

For example, water levels in Pozzillo reservoir in Sicily plunged from 74 million cubic metres in 1992 to 10 million cubic metres this year. It has a capacity of 123 million cubic metres.

Water levels in Sistema Flumendosa reservoir in Sardinia sank from 312.7 million cubic metres in 1992 to 15.5 million this year. It has a capacity of 645.1 million cubic metres.

Lobianco urged authorities to wake up to a major long-term structural problem by modernising infrastructure, building pipelines to transport water between regions and promoting public information campaigns to conserve water use.

The centre-right government of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has pledged to invest around $9 billion in public works projects in the south, including irrigation.

Rome-based Anbi is a public, non-profit-making body which coordinates public and private works in the irrigation sector.

It promotes soil protection, the rational use and management of water resources and environmental protection.