Buying time to tackle sustainability issue

I REFER to the letter “Unwise to freeze expansion of plantations” (The Star, Sept 10) and would like to express my disagreement with the author.

Firstly, the author argued that the correlation between oil palm expansion and deforestation is untrue. This is probably true in the past, as the global crash of rubber price in the late 1990s caused most rubber planters to switch to palm oil cultivation. However, if we were to expand oil palm cultivation today, what else can we convert if not forested lands? I sincerely hope that the answer is not degraded forests because I know the sly “first log, let degrade, then convert” sleight of hand well.