Zimbabwe will not burn its stockpile of ivory like Kenya did last month, but is seeking ways to sell it off on the international market, the country’s environment minister said.

The Southern Africa country has over 70 tons of ivory stocks estimated to be worth $35 million. Together with its regional counterpart Namibia they are seeking to open up international trade of the elephant tusks, Reuters reported.

Other African nations, led by Kenya which torched about 105 tons of elephant tusks and rhino horns worth $150 million in April, the biggest ever ivory-burning event, have been advocating for a total ban on ivory trade.

“There is no tangible evidence that trade bans have ever saved a species from extinction,” Oppah Muchinguri-Kashiri, Zimabwe’s environment minister, told diplomats from the Southern African Development Community (SADC).

“It is imperative for our regional economy that SADC countries unite in defending our right to sustainably use our natural resources.”

Zimbabwe, which currently has around 84,000 elephants, plans to lobby for support at the next U.N. Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) meeting in September.

Muchinguri argued that banning trade in ivory would not stop poaching and plans by the European Union to ban hunting trophies from Africa, as the United States did after the killing of Cecil the lion last year, would cause hunting revenues to fall and push people living near wildlife to resort to poaching.

In government paper to be put forward at the CITES meeting, Zimbabwe estimated that it lost 439 tons of ivory—worth an estimated $226 million—to illegal hunting between 2002 and 2014, which it views as a direct consequence of the trade ban on ivory, Bloomberg reported.

“It has no possibility whatsoever of passing and so why Zimbabwe would spend political capital or time or breath proposing something that has so little chance of any serious consideration at all, I don’t understand,” Patrick Bergin, CEO of the African Wildlife Foundation, told Newsweek.