SEOUL (AFP) — Cash-strapped North Korea has cut down on its main festivities to mark founding leader Kim Il-Sung's birthday to help save money in the impoverished Communist country, news reports said Sunday.
Choson Sinbo, a pro-Pyongyang newspaper for ethnic Koreans in Japan, reported on its online edition that North Korea had turned its annual "April Spring Friendship Art Festival" into an biennial event instead.
The festival, usually around Kim's birthday of April 15, has served as Pyongyang's most important fete to strengthen a personality cult around Kim's family in North Korea.
Kim's birthday is still the biggest holiday in North Korea despite his death in 1994. His son Kim Jong-Il has since ruled the country with a similarly iron-fisted approach.
The celebration, which began in 1982 to celebrate Kim's 70th birthday, usually invites foreign artists -- with Pyongyang footing the bill for travel expenses and accommodation.
But Seoul's Yonhap news agency, citing an unnamed North Korean defector who formerly worked for the foreign and cultural sectors, said worsening economic hardships had led Pyongyang to curtail the usually lavish celebration and most likely mean no international performers this year.
"Since it is difficult to reduce the size of annual performances for praising Kim Il-Sung, the North probably intends to replace part of the April festival with a domestic one," the defector told Yonhap.
Last year, British opera singer Suzannah Clarke and a US gospel music group Casting Crowns performed in the extravagant festival, the Yonhap report said.
A South Korean aid group said last week North Korea suspended state food rations in its main grain-producing area and reduced them in the capital amid worsening food shortages in recent months.
The United Nations World Food Programme said last month that almost a quarter of the North's 23 million people suffer from a severe lack of food.
In a report the UN body said nearly six million people are in need of foreign food aid this year, with children, mothers of babies and the poor most at risk.
The hermit state was badly hit by famine in the 1990s which killed hundreds of thousands. It has since heavily depended on international food aid to help feed its population.
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