Soybean · Share of World Oil-Crop Land · % (FAOSTAT)

## What this measures

The share of soya beans in the world area harvested for the five oil-crop groups (palm, soybean, rapeseed, sunflower, other), in percent: agriculture.fao.oilcrop_area_mha.soybean divided by agriculture.fao.oilcrop_area_mha.total. Annual from 1961, written only for years FAOSTAT publishes both oil output and area, so it always compares one year with the other share (agriculture.fao.vegoil_production_share.soybean). Cottonseed and maize oil are left out: they are by-products of crops grown for fibre and grain, and counting that land would swamp the comparison. Each value is dated December 31.

## Why it matters

Set beside its share of the oil, it shows whether a crop gives more or less oil than its land would suggest: a crop with a bigger share of oil than of land gets more oil per hectare than the average.

## How to read it

The five groups add up to 100. Compare with the oil share for the same year: palm's oil share is far above its land share; soybean's is far below.

## What it does not say

A crop's area is all the land it is harvested from, whatever else it yields. Soybeans are grown mostly for meal (most of the bean's weight becomes meal, not oil), rapeseed and sunflower also yield meal, and olives and coconuts are also eaten, so oil per hectare from these figures understates those crops and flatters palm, whose fruit is grown almost only for oil. The shares cover only the five groups, not every oil crop.

## Source

Palanor calculation from FAOSTAT, Production: Crops and livestock products (QCL), area World, read monthly (/api/cron/fao-oilcrops-sync). FAO Database terms of use (fao.org/contact-us/terms/db-terms-of-use): datasets in FAO corporate statistical databases "are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-4.0 International licence (CC BY 4.0)". Attribution: FAO. 2025. FAOSTAT: Production: Crops and livestock products. https://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#data/QCL. Licence: CC-BY-4.0. No FAO endorsement is implied.