SEOUL - NORTH Korea is lavishing money on an Olympic-size swimming pool and on renovating its capital while people grapple with a growing food crisis, a web newspaper run by defectors said on Wednesday.

The Seoul-based Daily NK, citing North Korean media reports in the past week, said Pyongyang was showcasing a 'modern' image while failing to address chronic food shortages.

Choson Sinbo, a newspaper published for North Koreans in Japan, reported last week that a modern swimming pool was under construction at the Kim Il Sung University in the capital.

In a separate report Choson said the three-storey Gwangbok Department Store in Pyongyang was having its entire facade replaced with glass for the first time in 20 years.

Glass-walled buildings are rare in the North's capital.

'We are trying to bring a modern sense to the facade of the department store,' manager Kim Bong Sun reportedly said.

Defectors who had fled their communist homeland gave a chilly response to the work, the Daily NK said.

'Starving people have resorted to eating wild roots to survive,' one of them was quoted as saying.

'In contrast, the authorities are promoting construction enterprises that are designed to serve only the privileged. This shows that (leader) Kim Jong Il has no interest whatsoever in people's well-being.'

Since a full-scale famine in the 1990s which killed hundreds of thousands, North Korea has depended on foreign aid to help feed its 23 million people.

The North's official Korean Central News Agency reported last week that Mr Kim Jong-Il was 'satisfied' with his visit to a newly-renovated movie theatre and remodelled restaurants in Pyongyang.

The agency separately reported last week on the construction of an outdoor swimming pool for students and workers in Sariwon south of Pyongyang. -- AFP