Around 1955, heterosis was found to exist in crosses between oil palms bred in Asia and those bred in Africa. In order to exploit it, a reciprocal recurrent selection scheme was launched Two selection cycles have been implemented since 1960. At the same time, varietal creation programmes were designed to enable integration of the genetic progress achieved in trials into the seeds distributed Oil palm seeds are grouped into categories which, in our scheme, are hybrids of full-sib families. Usually, the latter are derived from selfs of the best palms selected during a breeding cycle. As they are highly heterozygous, substantial genetic variance persists in those families, which it is possible to take advantage of through a pedigree selection cycle. It is then possible to improve certain traits of the initial hybrid category in a highly Significant way (production, extraction rate, disease resistance), whilst maintaining other favourable traits (bulk, vertical growth, etc.). Examples are given for 3 categories of hybrids from a network of 4 trials. Genetic progress has been achieved in production (between + 8 and 12%) and in the extraction rate (up to +10%). Significant progress has also been achieved in vascular will resistance. Provided selfs are available for varietal creation, this selection cycle can be launched very rapidly, well before the normal recurrent selection cycle with recombinations. This stage is also very effective for eliminating the genetic load, in that the best parents tested are reused in the recombination programme of the recurrent selection scheme.