The real-world production of palm oil is rife with the problems mentioned by others and yourself, but it is also typical of export agriculture in the global south. It isn’t something fixable through individual action and you will find that avoiding the types of things that are bad about current palm oil production are present in basically everything else or the alternatives have their own problems. Navigating ethical consumption at the level of commodity supply chains is often deeply fraught and this is one such case. For example, cobalt is often mined by child slaves. You don’t control whether that cobalt ends up in your electronics. Should we end child slavery? Yes! But it won’t come from better individual consumer choices, especially because you lack sufficient information to make judgements. Your phone might have that cobalt while your laptop doesn’t and even the manufacturer might not know. Is the palm oil in your crackers from land that orangurans inhabited? Was it stolen from indigenous people? Same deal, the information is hidden. Capitalist alienation is cascading levels of removal from the production process, of obfuscation that means you often can’t make such decisions.

I’ll give a contradictory example, though. With animal agriculture and veganism, drawing lines becomes much simpler. You just don’t consume animal products to the best of your ability. You can’t perfectly avoid them for the same reasons you don’t know where the cobalt came from, but it is very simple to avoid animal products most of the time without having to contend with the alternative being worse, as animal ag is usually a superset of other ag and production systems. It’s a “yes and” negative.

So to synthesize, if it is helpful for you, one thing you can do is try to avoid processed foods. This will decrease the length of the supply chain you know about and make it therefore more investigable. It’s also better for your health. Though to be clear, it isn’t free of ethical problems. In the US, for example, food is produced via the exploitation if a racialized economic underclass by monopolies that ensure Imperialist food policies globally, including the production of palm oil. But you can then take real action by fighting for farm workers’ rights, helping them unionize, etc. They are your neighbors.