MOTRIL, Spain — Early June is normally one of the busiest seasons here in Spain’s farming heartland, as an army of seasonal farmworkers harvests cucumbers and tomatoes in the 5,000 greenhouses that dot the surrounding countryside. But most of the greenhouses were deserted on Wednesday, as demand for Spanish vegetables collapsed after the regional authorities initially linked a deadly outbreak of E. coli in Germany to farms in Andalusia.
Far away from hospitals in Hamburg where patients have been dying, another crisis has been unfolding in Andalusia, which was already the region worst hit by the surge in Spanish unemployment set off by the worldwide financial crisis.
“Germany has destroyed my life this week,” said Miguel Rodríguez Puentedura, who had been picking cucumbers until Monday, when the greenhouse that employed him shut down.
On Tuesday, national officials in Germany, contradicting the earlier comments from regional officials, said that tests so far showed that Spanish cucumbers did not carry the strain of E. coli bacteria that had caused the deadly outbreak. Still, they did not officially rule out produce from Spain. And on Wednesday, European officials sought to ease consumer fears about any threat from fresh produce.
But few in Motril sounded optimistic.
“The consumer needs to hear that it’s completely safe to eat cucumbers and all our other produce, which is a message that certainly hasn’t been delivered by Germany so far,” said Adrián Picazo, director general of Mercomotril, a produce exporter.
In the late 1970s, Mr. Picazo recalled, orange production in his native region of Valencia slumped after mercury was found in some fruit. “It took a year for the citric sector to recover from that, and I’m not sure that it’s going to be much faster this time,” he said.
In fact, Motril was not mentioned last week by the German authorities as a possible source for the E. coli bacteria, but “no consumer in Germany or elsewhere ever goes beyond worrying about whether the label reads Spain or not,” Mr. Picazo said.
At Mercomotril’s plant, only one of eight conveyor belts was operating on Wednesday, with women unloading and packaging tomatoes for the Spanish and British markets.
Over the past week, the work force there has been cut to 25 from 110. Instead of trucks leaving the plant, one had just returned from Germany with 14 tons of unsold cucumbers, sent back by Rewe, a German retailer the Spanish company supplies.
“Rewe has behaved fairly, paying for the full transport cost as well as reimbursing us 10 cents per kilo of unwanted cucumbers,” Mr. Picazo said. “I expect a lot more supermarkets will be sending produce back in the coming days, but it’s crisis time for everybody and not all will probably offer us such decent terms.”
The Spanish authorities have estimated the weekly loss of revenue at 200 million euros because of canceled farming shipments, for which the Spanish government is expected to seek compensation from the European Union.
Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba, Spain’s deputy prime minister, said on Wednesday that “we do not rule out taking actions against Hamburg authorities who have questioned the quality of our products,” The Associated Press reported.
But the hope of financial relief seemed remote for those here. “There’s a lot of political talk, but in my 19 years in this job, I’ve certainly learned not to believe in any compensation pledge until I’ve got the money in my hand,” said Francisco García Vacas, the manager of a cucumber greenhouse, which let go of its 12 workers this week. “If demand doesn’t pick up by the weekend, the next step here will be to start dismantling this place.”
Motril has faced farming upheaval before. It developed as a hub for sugar cane, but that activity ceased after European Union subsidies to the sugar sector were declared illegal in 2005 by the World Trade Organization. Cucumber production then became the area’s main activity, in part because it is also one of the Spanish vegetables that has not faced tough competition from cheaper producers like Morocco.
Agriculture employs about 30,000 of the 150,000 people who live around Motril, according to the town’s mayor, Carlos Rojas.
Before the E. coli outbreak, he said, farming had been one of the few bright spots in the region’s economic landscape, offsetting some of the recent job losses in the collapsed and heavily indebted construction industry.
“It’s one disaster after another, because we’re now talking about huge job destruction in a sector that had managed to help us absorb a bit the bursting of the construction bubble,” he said.
Andalusia already had the most severe unemployment among Spain’s 17 regions, with a jobless rate of 29.7 percent at the end of the first quarter, according to the National Institute of Statistics. Spain’s average jobless rate of 21 percent is double that across the European Union.