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Teenage boys fleeing the North in the past decade are on average five inches shorter and weigh 25 pounds less than boys growing up in the South, according to measurements taken at a settlement center for defectors in South Korea.

Mental retardation caused by malnutrition will disqualify about a quarter of potential military conscripts in North Korea, according to a December report by the National Intelligence Council, a research institution that is part of the U.S. intelligence community. The report said hunger-caused intellectual disabilities among the young are likely to cripple economic growth, even if the country opens to the outside world or unites with the South.

As part of a government-ordered mass mobilization, they are making toibee, a fertilizer in which ash is mixed with their own excrement.

During a severe pre-harvest food shortage last summer, many soldiers received only two meals a day, were visibly malnourished and scavenged for food by stealing crops from state farms, he said. Troops in the city of Kangdong, about 18 miles east of Pyongyang, were ordered to stop training to conserve energy, according to a photographer who smuggled out photos of emaciated soldiers.

"The military was popular for kids so they wouldn't starve," Kwon said. "Now they feel it is better to make money in the market."



Because private traders needed to move goods, elites cashed in by creating a transportation system, Ishimaru said. His reporters have smuggled out stories about military and police officials buying secondhand buses from China and establishing intercity bus routes for traders.

About 4.5 million people stopped receiving food aid in December, and rations for another 1.8 million people, most of them children, have been halved. They go hungry as North Korea and the United States bicker over how -- and in what language -- free food is to be handed over.

The Minx wrote:These famines seem to be a perennial problem over there.