In Kazakhstan local food is not cheap as well. Yes, human labor is cheap. But that means that it's cheap for supply chain as well. I live in Astana and a lot of fruits are imported from Uzbekistan, even those that could be grown locally like apples. There are people who grow apples, potatoes and other vegetables in their gardens, mainly for themselves but they also sell what they don't need. And that price is not low. On the other side, imported vegetables usually don't have good taste, probably because they are optimized for export, so that high price vegetables have their buyers.