Profits from endangered species

Brian Ellsworth has a brief article in the New York Times on what looks like a very primitive form of creating economic incentives to preserve endangered species. It sounds so primitive at this point that it may make things worse instead of better, but time may change that.

Rather than enforcing a strict ban on the sale of macaws, Venezuela's environmental authorities have instead opted to allow some 30 Warao delta residents to capture and sell a controlled number of these birds. The idea is to provide income to the Warao, and an economic incentive to maintain the macaws.

Venezuela's macaw program is part of an increasingly popular but controversial conservation movement known as sustainable use. The philosophy is that saving a species may require commercially exploiting it.

Without some sort of legally enforcible property rights in the birds prior to their capture, I don't see how this can succeed: we simply create another "Tragedy of the Commons" in which he who takes the last one reaps the benefit while all bear the cost.