Rodrigo Marchi, Managing Director for the Americas at Suzano, framed his presentation around a central commercial argument: that eucalyptus-based hardwood pulp has moved well beyond its historical role as a cost-reduction tool and is now a performance fibre capable of helping customers compete on product quality.

Rodrigo Marchi

The presentation drew on Suzano’s experience working across tissue, packaging, and printing and writing grades, with a particular focus on substitution opportunities, the structural shift away from softwood, and what Marchi described as a deintegration strategy that is reshaping how some mills approach their fibre furnish. Marchi opened with the demand picture for hardwood pulp, noting the sustained growth trajectory that has characterized the segment over the past two decades, driven primarily by China.

Joaquín Kritz Lara, Chief Economist and Strategist with Numera Analytics, opened by noting that each year he focuses on a specific macro theme — tariffs the year prior, geopolitical risk the year before that. This year, he said, the answer was obvious: the conflict in the Middle East and its economic consequences, approached through two lenses — what it means for oil and gas markets, and how the broader economic fallout maps against the closest historical comparable, the stagflation episodes of the 1970s.

Joaquin Kritz Lara

On oil, Kritz Lara said the current situation is the worst energy crisis on record. He walked through the evolution of global oil production during previous major disruptions …before turning to the present. The current supply shortfall, depending on the estimates used, is running between 12% and 14% of global production. The only remotely comparable instance was the OPEC embargo of 1973, and even then it took close to two years for production to drop 10%. From a demand destruction perspective, he said, the current situation is comparable to COVID — and by his measure worse.

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 acknowledged the conference’s platinum sponsor, the Shanghai Port Authorities, and gold sponsors Suzano, UPM, and Svante, before outlining the 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.

Kevin Mason

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, 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.