LIMA – Peru has displaced Colombia as the world’s leading producer of coca leaf, although it succeeded for the first time in seven years in cutting output of the illicit plant used to make cocaine, the United Nations said Tuesday.

Peru cut its area under coca cultivation to 62,500 hectares, a decrease of 3.4 percent from 2011, the U.N. Office of Drugs and Crime said.

The agency had already said last month that Colombia’s crop was down 25 percent to 48,000 hectares, but it held off until now with word that Peru had regained the distinction as the world’s No. 1 coca leaf source, a position it had not held since the mid-1990s.

Peru counterdrug agency chief Carmen Masias said Colombia had the advantage of more than $6 billion in U.S. aid beginning in 2000 in trimming its coca crop. And unlike Colombia, Peru’s eradication of drug crops is manual. In Colombia, U.S. contractors spray herbicide.

But while U.S. aid to Colombia decreases, it is on the rise in Peru.

More than $55 million in U.S. counterdrug assistance that includes airlift and alternative development helped Peru eradicate 14,000 hectares of coca last year, and that amount was doubled to $100 million this year, half of Washington’s total assistance to Peru, officials said.

Unlike Colombia, most cocaine produced in Peru is exported not to the United States but to Brazil, Argentina and Europe. Much of it is smuggled by air and land through Bolivia, the world’s No. 3 coca-producing country with a crop about a third the size of Peru’s.