Mormon church’s $490m spending spree exposes trade deal blind spot
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Nationals leader David Littleproud has called for changes to the Australia-US Free Trade Agreement following a spending spree by the US Mormon church in which almost half a billion dollars’ worth of Australian farmland fell into foreign ownership in little more than six months.
In August last year, the US church-owned Farmland Reserves bought Worral Creek Aggregation, north of Mungindi in Queensland for $350 million. In March this year it paid $68 million for the North Star Aggregation near Moree in NSW, and in April it bought Kentucky Farms at Forbes for $38 million and Carnarvon Aggregation at Gunnedah for $32 million.
Sources told the AFR Weekend that Farmland Reserve has agents looking for more large Australian farms to buy.
None of these sales were subject to scrutiny from the Foreign Investment Review Board because the AUSFTA, signed in 2004 by former Nationals leader Mark Vaile, gives US investors (and those from New Zealand and Chile) an almost unfettered right to buy Australian farmland.
Buyers from the US can purchase farming ventures up to a value of $1.46 billion per venture, and there is a fear within the Australian farming community that the Mormons, with billions of dollars to spend, could change the face of Australian agriculture. For investors from other nations the cumulative total is capped at $15 million.
Content retrieved from: https://www.afr.com/companies/agriculture/mormon-church-s-490m-spending-spree-exposes-trade-deal-blind-spot-20250808-p5mle9.
