Umm... that's quite simply false. Between 1994 and 1998, somewhere between 240K and 3.5M people died from famine in North Korea (of a total population of ~20M).[1] And while it's possible that there are similarly arduous conditions in China, the Philippines, Thailand, and (even) the US, the average citizen is certainly better off in all of those places.
To put those famine figures in perspective, that's roughly the equivalent of half of California perishing from starvation during the mid-1990s (at a national scale -- if you prefer to think at a more regional scale it's like losing SF from the Bay Area).
We desperately need a Poe's Law or a Godwin's law to describe this common scenario. In any sufficiently-long comment thread, the probability of someone falsely equating the USA and $DICTATORSHIP, or invoking moral relativism to achieve the same end, approaches 1.
Your comparison is still off. North Koreans will risk their lives to escape to rural China. In China and Philippines there might be poor sanitation and malnutrition but you won't find a lot of people actually starving to death.
To put those famine figures in perspective, that's roughly the equivalent of half of California perishing from starvation during the mid-1990s (at a national scale -- if you prefer to think at a more regional scale it's like losing SF from the Bay Area).
[1] See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Korean_famine for a quick overview