Interview with Catherine Cobden, President and CEO, FPAC
by Glenn Ostle

During PaperCon 2012 in New Orleans, Paper360° had the opportunity to speak with Ms. Catherine Cobden who is currently serving as interim President and CEO of the Forest Products Association of Canada (FPAC) following the retirement of the long-time CEO, Avrim Lazar.

Previously Cobden was a Senior Vice President of FPAC and for 22 years has been a passionate and strategic voice for the forest products sector. She has taken a leadership role in encouraging the economic and environmental transformation of the forest products industry and has played a key role in developing the Canadian Forest Sector Transformation Strategy.

Q: Avrim Lazar has retired. Has a replacement been named?
A: A new CEO has been identified and will start in September, but has not yet been announced.

Q: What are some of the hot topics in the Canadian pulp and paper industry today?
A: The main topic of conversation revolves around improving the competitive position of the Canadian industry. It has been a tough few years given the collapse of our U.S. market and the fact that home starts are still depressed. We continue to look for ways to grow our market and develop the environmental aspects of our businesses.

While we were in that deep, dark place we didn't just sit back and wait it out, as we may have been accused of doing previously. We did our homework on how to transform the industry. We found opportunities in bioproducts and today there are shifts going on in Canada in that regard. We also saw opportunities in other areas such as serving the textile industry. And I'm amazed about how specialty cellulose has grown in Canada. We are really becoming a global leader of that product.

We didn't appreciate that there is a $200 billion biochemical market out there, and growing. Now that we've been awakened to that potential, pulp mills are getting more serious about taking the steps necessary to become the biorefineries of the future. And the start up of CelluForce's NCC project has made the rest of the world envious.

We have completed a detailed investigation of how to get the most value from every tree we cut. This has lead to the Bio-pathways project where we identified 37 different pathways for the forest products industry to transform itself.

Our most impressive work has been in the area of diversifying our market. We have built relationships in China and to a lesser extent in India. The forest products sector is now Canada's largest exporter of anything to China and the second largest to India. Other Canadian sectors are looking at us for lessons to be learned.

Q: Such changes must have necessitated some new thinking.
A: Yes, we realized that going forward, the role of business-to-business partnerships would be important.

One of main parts of our study showed that in order to make bioproducts efficiently, production should be integrated into current facilities. But if you think about those operations that make the products, also selling them to the world, it doesn't really make sense. So we started exploring a model where we worked in partnership with chemical or aviation companies, to help us move from a commodity to a niche mentality.

A year ago we established the bio-pathways partnership network open to suppliers and technology providers around the world, as a way for our folks to meet people in other sectors. Today we have 180 non-forest company participants. I like to call it our "dating service" as companies come together to explore opportunities. There's a tremendous interest in how the Canadian natural resources can be used to make these new products, by the folks that might be using those products in their own manufacturing.

Q: Are you introducing any other new programs?
A: We are getting ready to announce a new vision for the industry. For several years we've been working on a transformation strategy that has four main parts: productivity improvements (to become low cost producers); market diversification; green credentials; and how to extract more value from forests (what new products are needed and what is the model for making them?). The vision statement will articulate what the transformation strategy will lead to. (Editor's Note: the vision was announced on May 22 under the brand of "Canada's Natural Advantage." It states that "by 2020, the Canadian forest products industry will power Canada's new economy by being green, innovative and open to the world," and sets three ambitious goals for the sector including: generate an additional $20 billion in economic activity from new innovations and growing markets; deliver a further 35% improvement in the sector's environmental footprint; and renew the workforce with at least 60,000 new recruits including women, Aboriginals and immigrants.)

Q: You mentioned "green credentials"
A: FPAC, its members and nine leading environmental organizations, including Greenpeace, signed the largest conservation agreement the world has ever seen in May 2010, the Canadian Boreal Forest Accord (CBFA). It covers more than 72 million hectares of public forests licensed to FPAC member companies across Canada. It is a concrete commitment between FPAC members and environmental groups to work together in the marketplace and on the ground to support sustainable forest management.

This groundbreaking agreement brought us from essentially a "war in the woods," to consultation where we talked "at" instead of "with" each other, to today where we are working together to manage forests.

It was a game-changing exercise for us. There is so much work to do on that agreement and implementing it is a real priority, but it doesn't happen easily. We have very different views of the world. But when we sit down and talk through and understand where we have some room and where we don't, we can make significant progress.

Q: How did the accord come about?
A: We found ourselves in difficult circumstances. The Boreal campaign was heating up, and we had experience with campaigns in other parts of the country. Could we do something different? We didn't want to live through the pain of the past. We were already working with environmental partners on other issues, so we started discussions with them. We all had to be very courageous to go down this path and do something different. It took a couple of years at least to negotiate and we are excited about the accomplishments, but we have a lot more to do.

CBFA is embedded with twin pillars in our strategy, economic as well as environmental. But it is a massive umbrella agreement with lots of opportunities. So we are going to work hard to implement it.

The Forest Products Association of Canada (FPAC) is the voice of Canada's wood, pulp and paper producers nationally and internationally in government, trade, and environmental affairs. Canada's forest products industry is a 57 billion dollar a year industry that represents 12% of Canada's manufacturing GDP. The industry is one of Canada's largest employers, operating in 200 forest-dependent communities from coast to coast, and directly employing 230,000 Canadians across the country.

Glenn Ostle is Editorial Director/Associate Publisher of Paper360° magazine. He can be reached at: gostle@tappi.org.