Meeting the UN's "Millennium Development Goals", which call for poverty and hunger to be reduced by half within a decade, would require today's water access levels to double, they said.

"The huge amount of water needed to feed the hungry has not been very clearly highlighted in the Millennium project," Malin Falkenberg, member of the scientific programme committee at the Swedish water institute said in her closing remarks on Friday.

"Achieving the hunger goal, which is the number one goal, will require a massive quantity of fresh water," said Johan Rockstroem, executive director of the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI).

"We have 800 million undernourished people. To give food to 400 million people we must mobilize 2,200 km3 of fresh water in the next 10 years, which is equivalent to irrigation today," he said.

Participants said the huge increase in the required water supply should be achieved with sustainable, often traditional techniques, and not by using Western technology without regard to local conditions and the environment.

"Environmentally sustainable management strategies are a prerequisite for long-term and resilient improvement of the lives of poor people," the SEI said in a report to be submitted to a UN Millennium Goal summit in New York on September 14 and 15.

Rockstroem said the additional needs of agriculture should be met primarily with a better management of "green water" from rainwater and underground wells, rather than "blue water" from rivers and lakes.

This means that the construction of dams should be reduced in favour of updating ancient techniques like rainwater collection, particularly adapted to India, and fighting ground erosion.

"We need to revive these traditions for the future," said Sunita Narain, head of the Centre for Science and Environment and this year's Stockholm Water Prize winner.

"We need to make sure that more and more people can harvest in different manners. Of course it's a difficult challenge," she told AFP.

Due to monsoons, Indian regions can receive a whole year's rainfall in a single month, making water collection and storage a major challenge.

Narain said the ancient kundi water storage systems, as well as water collecting devices placed on rooftops in cities had been efficient options in the past and governments were ready to revive them.

"These traditions had been abandoned because the British changed the irrigation water management history. They brought centralized bureaucracies. They neglected the systems of the people to manage their water," she said.

The Stockholm water week, which brings together 1,200 experts, ministers and officials from 100 countries, closed officially on Friday, with a number of seminars and workshops spilling over into the weekend.

The annual event aims to serve as a link between practice, science, policy and decision-making in the search for sustainable solutions for water resource management.

"We aim to be the Davos of the water world," spokesman Dave Trouba said, referring to a prestigious annual meeting of world leaders in the Swiss mountain resort.

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