a bit too many specious and misleading arguments here.

firstly:

1. land use — a hectare of tropical rainforest is more valuable than a hectare of Iowa rapeseed. So this argument is weak
2. ‘they’d just chop it down for something else’ — this is a very weak argument, I suggest not using it. Palm oil is particularly appealing in Indonesia because of the plantation system. There are for example no 10,000 hectare rice farms, etc., the only large plantations are palm oil (and historically rubber).
3. the demand for food oil won’t go down — in fact this is not true, food oil was first introduced to fuel by the EU, and now the EU are restricting this. Since for example palm oil biodiesel was only viable in the EU because of laws mandating its use, it follows that alternative fuels not based on vegetable oils will reduce total demand for vegetable oil.
4. there is no alternative — this is not true, in fact the EU grows more food oil than it consumes, it’s just the evil of burning vegetable oils means it ends up importing palm oil. No more land is needed to feed Western consumers. This is simply false. European palm oil consumption for food is only 2.5 million tonnes in 2018, while there is production of 13.3 million tonnes of rape/sunflower. Western countries are easily self-sufficient in vegetable oils — demand for palm oil is more in developing countries such as India.
5. land usage — misleading. Soy is not functionally an oil crop, it is grown for protein as animal feed. Rape also has protein byproduct, although it is more functionally an oil seed (palm oil produces protein byproduct also but it is less valuable). Any land analysis should consider the full outputs. Claiming that alternative oil seeds could EVER result in 9x land usage can really only be described as lies.
6. land usage figures — wrong. UK rape yields averages 3.5 tonnes/hectare. Oil yield is >40%, which is 1.4 tonnes of oil per hectare.
7. sustainable — largely meaningless greenwashing. I live in a RSPO-certified plantation. There is a rubbish dump ~400 metres away from me with all kinds of toxic waste. I watch how oil seeds make their way to the mills for the mills which buy FFBs from smallholders (i.e. the mill is not only serving its own plantation), and it is certain that oil seeds from illegal land would make their way into the food chain. One company I saw boasting about sustainable palm oil listed more ‘sustainable’ mills than exist in all of Indonesia. It is ludicrous and laughable. It’s one thing if you have your own palm oil plantation and only supply from that, but these don’t, they have essentially certified most of the world’s supply. About 15 seconds on Google would show recent and current issues with numerous companies.

Note that at this point the available supply for sustainable palm oil far exceeds maximum possible demand. I can only imagine that the ultimately goal will be to certify palm oil into EU biofuel, which has been frozen at current levels and which will be required to be ‘sustainable’ in the future to be counted towards quotas.

Sustainable palm oil is business as usual greenwashing for big corps.

I imagine that there’s a bit of cash floating around for various NGOs from it, who are happy to endorse it as a result.