Oil crops: new challenges and trends in their development

The purpose of the article is to identify specific causes, conditions and consequences of increased interest to oil crops at both the global and national levels. Economic-statistical, abstract-logical, graphical, expert evaluation and regression methods were applied in research. Materials of the State and Customs statistics of the Russian Federation, the National Register of the Russian Federation, the Ministry of Agriculture of the Russian Federation, and USDA were used. Over the past 10 years, world oil crops acreage has grown by 21%, and their production has grown by 38%. The increasing interest of farmers to soybean, rapeseed, sunflower and other oil crops was followed by intensification of breeding programs, which led to the creation of GM varieties and hybrids raising the efficiency of investment return to breeding programs. The growth of oil crops acreage in the world was accompanied by the reduction of barley (16%), millet (30%), oats (77 %) and rye (86%) acreages since 1960 to the present day. In Russia, for the last 25 years, oil crops acreage also had increased by 4 times, up to 12.3 million hectares at the expense of fodder and cereal crops.