Sobering article about the heights of northerner versus southerners as a result of the perpetual food shortages in the DPRK:
I remember being in a place like that once, back in 1972, when I was standing in a large crowd of about 100 or so people waiting to board a ferry. As I waited, I suddenly realized that I was quite literally looking down over the tops of everyone's heads. The only other person that was taller who, at eye to eye level with me, was some white guy. The two of us looked like we were floating in a pool of black hair; we were literally one full head higher than anyone else. What surprises people most about this is when I reveal that that this was actually at the Star Ferry (now defunct) terminal of Hong Kong. Years later, as diets within the colony improved with government sponsored milk programs, and along with a better economy with incomes allowing more meats to be purchased, HK children were then able to reach their full growth potential. Thus, the idea that DPRK children are height deprived as a result of poor diet is not unusual at all. Rather it provides mute but telling testimony as the long standing fragility of their economy. This is why too, that despite their bellicose rhetoric, they would never be able to sustain any military action of duration. That is, combat soldiers require roughly three times as much caloric intake over that of peace time. Another location less talked about is South America, where chronic poverty, especially in rural areas, routinely prevent those peoples from attaining full height as a population. As I had mentioned here years ago, the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, who had produced special low height charts for indigenous Puerto Ricans, subsequently had to discard them as nutrition there improved with attendant growth normalization (relative to US Americans) of their population.
