You're mixing up two separate things which the cartel offers: insurance and quotas. You can also roughly split the "membership dues" into to parts. The 12% can

You're mixing up two separate things which the cartel offers: insurance and quotas. You can also roughly split the "membership dues" into to parts. The 12% can be thought of as a fee for "all-in" crop insurance, which pays for things like storage for later sale during bad years of production and so on. Production quotas can be thought of as the fee for cartel membership. The insurance issue is a purely financial problem, it can be fixed by financial products like crop insurance and futures contracts. That's how modern agriculture works. With a competitive market, the cost of this insurance would go down for farmers, since it would be provided at competitive market rates. 12% is an enormous fee. (The fees of financial products are harder to measure, since they are measured implicitly through things like futures prices and so on. But they would be much less than 12%.) 25 years ago these financial innovations not as developed as they are today. Quebec is still relatively isolated from these markets in all likelihood, but I bet we'd see good alternatives being marketed to farmers if FPAQ were dismantled. The only benefit to farmers of a cartel vs. competitive markets is price-fixing. That is wretched and immoral, and self-destructive by its nature, as we see here. The fact that farmers can freeload on both the fees and the insurance makes it even worse.