Thrakika Ekkokistiria S.A. reported that the wasteful farming practices and booming tourism are stretching Greece's water resources and threatening a third of the country's land with lasting damage, experts and government officials warned.
"It is not necessary to use so much water," said Ilias Mariolakos, a professor of geology at Athens University of Athens.
"It is easier to protect what we have now than ... recover what we had," he said in remarks prepared for Friday's start of a three-day conference on water management in Greece and other southeast European countries.
Some 35 percent of the country is in danger of land damage through drought, largely because of wasteful irrigation, according to the World Wide Fund for Nature.
In a July report cited at the conference, the WWF said 85 percent of Greek water consumption is guzzled by agriculture - with most of the water squandered through irrigation losses or used on demanding crops like cotton.
The WWF and other conservation groups are fighting a government proposed project to divert water from the Acheloos River, the country's second largest river in western Greece, to the central farming belt. The project has been blocked for years by legal challenges to the Council of State, the country's highest administrative court.
Anastasia Lazarou-Bakali, a representative of the Environment Ministry, acknowledged Greece's water management problems and said the government hoped to ease difficulties by renegotiating agreements with neighboring Macedonia and Bulgaria to increase supplies from cross border rivers.
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