International Pulp Week opened Monday morning in Vancouver with Tim Brown, vice president with PPPC, welcoming delegates to the 21st edition of the conference. Brown noted that scheduling complications arising from the FIFA World Cup’s impact on Vancouver hotel availability and thanked attendees for accommodating the shift. He acknowledged the conference’s platinum sponsor, the Shanghai Port Authorities, and gold sponsors Suzano, UPM, and Svante, before outlining a program built around a central theme of fibre selection. He then handed the session over to Kevin Mason, Managing Director of ERA Forest Products Research, who served as both opening speaker and moderator for the day.
Mason opened with a framing device drawn from classical history. The post-1945 international order, he argued, can be understood as a Pax Americana — a system analogous to the Roman Empire’s Pax Romana, in which the dominant power’s global projection underwrote open trade flows, resource access, and the primacy of the US dollar in international commerce. That system, he said, is now over. In its place, he described a retreat toward hemispheric consolidation — manifest in US rhetoric around Canada as a 51st state, Greenland, and Latin America — which commentators have dubbed the Donroe Doctrine, or the Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. Whether by design or otherwise, the Trump administration’s actions represent a fundamental break from the institutions and norms established after 1945, with the UN, international courts, and a range of multilateral frameworks all, in Mason’s words, under attack. The operating logic, he suggested, is straightforward: the strong do what they want, and the weak suffer what they must.
Mason situated this shift within a longer historical argument, drawing on the work of Neil Howe and William Strauss (The Fourth Turning), Ray Dalio of Bridgewater Associates, and Peter Turchin’s Clio Dynamics framework. All three approached the question through different methodologies but converged on the same conclusion: the current decade was always going to be a period of serious instability. Structural factors including debt levels, wealth inequality, and what Turchin has termed “elite overproduction” had been pointing toward disruption regardless of who was in power. “Even if Trump wasn’t here, we would still be having problems,” Mason said. “He’s probably just amplified them and made things much more dramatic.” He quoted Dalio’s recent assessment that the next three to five years will be “disorderly,” noting that this came from someone who had spent years studying the rise and fall of empires across a millennium of history and still could offer no easy answers.
Dalio’s framework for imperial decline, Mason said, is particularly instructive when applied to the United States today. Late-stage indicators — large debts, money printing, and internal conflict — are all present. The one indicator still in the US column is reserve currency status, though Mason noted it is under active pressure. Central banks, he said, are increasingly accumulating gold rather than US Treasuries, with some estimates suggesting gold holdings have now reached parity with Treasury holdings among central banks globally. The driver, in his view, is the weaponization of the dollar — its use as a geopolitical instrument has made it a liability, and gold, as he put it, is nobody’s liability. China has been quietly working to shift bilateral trade away from US dollars and into yuan. US actions in Venezuela — which Mason interpreted as redirecting oil flows away from China toward the United States, priced in dollars — and the establishment of dollar swap lines with the UAE following Iranian attacks on Gulf states are, in his reading, efforts to reinforce dollar dominance in the face of that pressure. China responded last week with a blocking order against US sanctions, placing any financial institution doing business with sanctioned Chinese firms in the position of choosing between compliance with Washington or Beijing. “China is basically pushing back on the US,” Mason said.
On the immediate economic situation, Mason described a K-shaped US economy in which aggregate consumer spending numbers look acceptable but mask significant divergence. He estimated that roughly two-thirds of Americans are facing tightening budgets, pressure from energy costs, and job insecurity, while the top tier continues to spend freely. He used the analogy of a person with their head in a fire and feet in a freezer: the average temperature looks fine, but the extremes tell a different story. US consumer sentiment is at historic lows, and the Iran conflict — specifically its effect on gasoline prices is cutting directly into Trump’s political base. For households earning above roughly $125,000, gas prices are, in his words, “ignorable.” For the significant portion of Trump’s base earning below that threshold, they are not. He suggested the midterms are shaping up badly for Republicans, with the House likely gone and the Senate potentially in play, though he acknowledged six months remains a long time.
The war, Mason said, remains the central variable. He described the “taco trade” — a pattern among Wall Street investors of betting that Trump would reverse policy when equity markets reacted negatively — as now giving way to what traders have termed the NACHO trade — “not a chance Hormuz opens” — reflecting growing doubt that the strait will reopen quickly. A peace proposal, he noted, had just been rejected. The Strait of Hormuz closure has not yet produced its full economic effects: ships that loaded before the conflict have delivered their cargoes, and strategic petroleum reserves have buffered the immediate impact. “We haven’t really seen the full impacts,” Mason said. Physical shortages, and with them outright demand destruction, are still coming. Fertilizer availability and agricultural markets will be among the downstream consequences.
Despite the difficult global backdrop, Mason suggested the US is in a comparatively better position than Europe or parts of Asia, primarily because of its energy self-sufficiency — a contrast he noted was not true in the 1970s. European equity markets fell sharply when bombing began in late February, while US markets have shown more resilience. China entered the conflict with approximately 100 days of oil reserves, providing meaningful flexibility, but not indefinitely.
Turning to pulp markets, Mason described a sector that looks healthy at the aggregate level but contains significant internal divergence — an observation he explicitly compared to the K-shaped economy. Hardwood pulp has been the primary driver of demand growth over the past two decades, with softwood showing little increase over the same period. Capacity expansion, while generating periodic concern given the scale of new Latin American mills, has been broadly absorbed by demand, keeping hardwood operating rates at or above 90%. The softwood picture is considerably weaker: operating rates have been stuck below 90 percent for several years, and where the market used to add roughly 300,000 tonnes of new softwood capacity annually, it has now swung to losing a little over 300,000 tonnes per year. Year-to-date data for 2026 point to another year of net reduction.
China, Mason said, remains the defining force in global pulp demand, accounting for roughly 40 percent of total market pulp consumption, with virtually all of the growth over the past two decades attributable to Chinese mills. But the nature of China’s participation is shifting. What his company characterized as a golden age of import-driven demand through the middle of the last decade has given way to a more mixed picture, as China builds out domestic pulping capacity integrated with its paper and board mills. ERA’s internal estimate is that China currently sources roughly half its wood pulp supply domestically, with that share potentially reaching close to 60% by 2030. Imports can still grow in absolute terms, Mason said, but the rate of growth relative to total Chinese consumption will slow. The domestic build is constrained, however, by fibre availability — a point Mason flagged as a limiting factor that will shape how far China’s self-sufficiency can actually go.
China’s fibre constraint creates what Mason described as a potentially significant commercial opportunity, particularly in the US South. He had recently attended a bioenergy conference in Georgia, where he observed that a wave of mill closures by GP, IP, and other major producers had left an exceptional surplus of pine pulpwood in that region. Pine pulpwood prices are at their lowest in more than two decades — and on an inflation-adjusted basis, the lowest ever recorded. A forecast from consulting firm Forisk showed the surplus continuing to grow, with the recent closure wave not yet fully captured in the projections. The combination of Chinese fibre demand and abundant, severely underpriced US South supply represents a logical match, he argued, though he acknowledged the competitive implication: sustained Chinese access to US South fibre could reduce long-term demand for market pulp imports.
On the export side, Mason noted that Chinese paper and board production — particularly coated ivory board and folding boxboard — is already generating significant export volumes seeking markets globally. Printing and writing grades have had meaningful exposure to the Middle East, now disrupted by the conflict, raising the question of where that product goes next. Looking further out, he suggested China’s competitive reach in paper and board could expand beyond its current grade positions if access to additional fibre opens up, potentially displacing market pulp demand in categories not yet affected.
Mason closed with three summary points: the Pax Americana is over, with lasting consequences for global alliances and trade flows that remain difficult to predict; the Hormuz closure will produce effects — physical shortages, demand destruction, and downstream commodity impacts — that have not yet fully materialized; and China will continue to import more pulp in absolute terms, but is increasingly a competitor as well as a customer, with that dynamic likely to intensify if its fibre access grows.
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