A Small Problem Growing

Myung Bok escaped the communist North last summer to join his mother and younger sisters, who had fled to China earlier. When he arrived, 14-year-old sister Eun Hang didn't recognize the scrawny little kid walking up the dirt path to their cottage in a village near the North Korean border. She hadn't seen him in four years.

"He's short. I can't believe he used to be my big brother," Eun Hang said sadly as she recalled their early childhood, when Myung Bok was always a full head taller. Now she can peek over the crown of his head without standing on her tiptoes.

The teenagers go through an almost daily ritual: They stand against a wooden wardrobe in which they've carved notches with a penknife, hoping that by eating a regular diet Myung Bok will grow tall enough to reclaim his status as big brother.

They're not the only ones obsessed with height. The short stature of North Koreans reflects an international humanitarian crisis -- one fraught with diplomatic and political overtones. It is at the heart of a debate in the international community over whether North Korea should continue to get food aid despite its quest for nuclear weapons.

The World Food Program and UNICEF reported last year that chronic malnutrition had left 42% of North Korean children stunted -- meaning their growth was seriously impaired, most likely permanently. An earlier report by the United Nations agencies warned that there was strong evidence that physical stunting could be accompanied by intellectual impairment.

South Korean anthropologists who measured North Korean refugees here in Yanji, a city 15 miles from the North Korean border, found that most of the teenage boys stood less than 5 feet tall and weighed less than 100 pounds. In contrast, the average 17-year-old South Korean boy is 5-foot-8, slightly shorter than an American boy of the same age.

The height disparities are stunning because Koreans were more or less the same size -- if anything, people in the North were slightly taller -- until the abrupt partitioning of the country after World War II. South Koreans, feasting on an increasingly Western-influenced diet, have been growing taller as their estranged countrymen have been shrinking through successive famines.