I would like to see the methods used by the UN to determine this:

North Korea’s total population stood around 24 million as of late October.

That’s according to U.N. Population Fund survey statistics reported by Radio Free Asia on Saturday.

The report said the population comprised of eleven-point-seven million men and 12-point-three million women.

By region, North Pyeongan Province had the highest population with some four million followed by Pyongang with three-point-two million and North Hamgyeong Province with some three million.

Meanwhile, the population in northernmost mountain regions of Jagang Province and Ryangang Province stood at some two million, or only eight percent of the North’s population.

The recent population survey was conducted last October on some six million households in the North, excluding military facilities.  [KBS Global]

In 1992 a ROK Drop favorite, scholar Nicholas Eberstadt and demographer Judith Banister estimated the North Korean population at 21.4 million.  So according to these latest numbers from the UN, the North Korean population has grown in the last 16 years despite a mass famine that killed possibly 2.5 million people, continuing starvation in many areas, high infant mortality rates, poor public health services, continuing executions in the gulags, and mass defections to China.

You will have to excuse if I don’t believe a darn thing about North Korea coming from the UN.