That's one way to look at the problem ( we need to get people to stop destroying rainforest by giving them their livehood), another way is that once there is no value in destroying the rainforest, people will stop doing so.
In this regard, coming up with a palm oil substitute is very valuable, because it takes away a major reason to destroy the rainforest.
And now, since they can no longer drill the rainforest for a ( relatively easy) living, they have to drill their brain, which is not necessarily a bad thing. Big South East Asia countries are generally cursed with natural resources[0], they have oil, timber and whatnot, and yet their GDPs dwarfed compared to Singapore and lag behind in virtually all the indexes measuring good living like corruption index, a tiny SEA country with absolutely zero natural resources.
Stop people from destroying the rainforest comes first before giving them their livehood, not after.
That's pretty much what has happened with the coal industry though. Coal is only used as a fuel because it is cheap, not because we need it [0]. And it's cheap because of goverment subsidies and political power, to continue providing coal miners in Wyoming earning $20/hour a job.
[0] ...as a fuel. Yes there are other industrial uses of coal, but it is mostly used as a fuel.
The resource curse also exists in software. I've seen so many comments that try to justify excessive RAM usage with "RAM is cheap". It's only "cheap" if you don't waste it. Otherwise your consumption will increase to match whatever is available even if the additional value the additional consumption provides is close to zero.
Clearly you did not read the OP's comment very well
Even if you make the rainforest value 0, the land is very rich and fertile, so if the native plants have a value of 0, they will be removed and replanted with cash crops of some kind unless you resolve the economic reality
So you're saying that Malaysia and Indonesia should become tax havens?
The massive corruption and whatnot in these places is precisely what allowed Singapore to thrive (apart from being lucky enough to be located at a strait). Singapore essentially eats away at their GDP to sustain itself. Almost all of the tech scene in Singapore is largely talented folks from Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, India, etc. moving away because SG has a lower tax rate and a very lighthanded bureaucracy.
If corruption in these places was to vanish and doing business made easy (via free zones for instance), Singapore would return to stagnation.
In this regard, coming up with a palm oil substitute is very valuable, because it takes away a major reason to destroy the rainforest.
And now, since they can no longer drill the rainforest for a ( relatively easy) living, they have to drill their brain, which is not necessarily a bad thing. Big South East Asia countries are generally cursed with natural resources[0], they have oil, timber and whatnot, and yet their GDPs dwarfed compared to Singapore and lag behind in virtually all the indexes measuring good living like corruption index, a tiny SEA country with absolutely zero natural resources.
Stop people from destroying the rainforest comes first before giving them their livehood, not after.
[0]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse