Spanish farmers devastated by the deadly E.coli outbreak gave away tons of produce today to draw attention to their plight.

Hundreds of people queued in Madrid to edge past tables brimming with produce from all over Spain. They walked away with plastic bags or cardboard crates bulging with ripe peppers, tomatoes, apricots, lettuce, potatoes and just about everything else that grows this time of year.

Farm leaders at a press conference joined the Spanish government in rejecting as insufficient an EU aid offer of 150 million euros (£134 million) for farmers across Europe.

They called on the European Union to help Germany - which initially blamed Spanish cucumbers for the outbreak, then German beansprouts, only to backtrack both times - and take on a much bigger role in investigating the still-unknown source of the bacteria that has killed 26 people and sickened over 2,700.

They also urged a massive public relations campaign to restore European consumer confidence in fresh produce - something that will be hard to do when Germany still has not found the source of the deadly outbreak.

"The EU must be responsible. It should not try to buy us off," said Miguel Lopez, secretary general of the COAG farm association.

"It is disgraceful. It is humiliating. It is pathetic," he said of the EU aid offer.

Francisco Gil, a 52-year-old farm leader from the south-east Murcia region, said money for lost sales will not solve the problem, officials must find the source of the bacteria to restore consumer confidence.

The EU, he said, "has not addressed the real issue. It is not about money. It is about fixing the problem."