Crops for vegetable oil production

Globaly around 314 million hectares are planted with oil crops. The major commercial oil crops are soybeans, oil palms, and rapeseed. The following figure gives an impression of the area shares of the individual crops.

The total vegetable oil production in 2018 was around 203 million tonnes. Around 87% were produced from the above-mentioned major crops. The remaining amount of vegetable oil comes from crops like olives, peanuts, cottonseed, sesame seed, linseed, kapok fruit or jojoba seed and some other.

Since the crops displayed in the figure above have different oil yields per hectare, the share of the different crops in the total oil production differs (see following figure). Most of vegetable oil was produced from oil palm fruits and kernels in 2018. Due to their high productivity, oil palms just occupy 7% of the total oil crop area.

Over the past 20 years, world oil crop production (FAO 2020) and vegetable oil demand has grown continuously (Mielke 2018).