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Uruguay Small Farmers and Rural Workers
Although they accounted for only about 5 percent of
Uruguay's
total land, small farms were common in the littoral and
the
south. Owners of medium-sized farms were able to
approximate the
living standards of the urban middle class, but for tenant
farmers and proprietors of smaller areas, life was a
constant
struggle. Particularly poor were the small producers of
Canelones
Department who grew vegetables for the capital.
Because the rural economy was not at all labor
intensive,
Uruguay had very few rural workers. One exception was the
department of Artigas, where large sugarcane plantations
had
grown up. The very low wages of the cane cutters caused
them to
form a union in the 1960s and to bring their protests to
the
streets of the capital. Apart from this, however,
Uruguay's few
rural workers and small farmers had not managed to form
organizations to defend their economic interests. In
particular,
the Ruralist movement of the 1950s and 1960s, which began
as a
protest by the small farmers against government taxes,
soon fell
under the leadership of large landowners. In the late
1980s, a
rural workers' union claimed a membership of only 4,000
(see
The Labor Movement;
Land Use and Tenure
, ch. 3).
Data as of December 1990
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