I agree with your general point, but I just read the book "Your life is manufactured" by Tim Minshall, in which he describes the production of toilet paper in detail and it's a surprising global industry. Wood pulp with the correct density comes from a few specific places on the globe (Scandinavia and South America apparently).
Those are big markets, but there are a lot of suitable softwoods for pulp production, farmed around the globe. Ideally, you want to use ones with good natural ratios of lignin to cellulose and hemicellulose (that's just to say, the constituents of biomass) to minimize processing and chemistry costs.