Mystery of Missing Mushrooms Leaves French Blaming Roma Nanda Gonzague for The New York Times Some French mushroom pickers, disappointed by low yields, say that foreigners are at fault. PARIS - Guy Sant is distressed about the sorry state of his mushroom business this year. Usually in the autumn, when the weather turns brisk and the leaves begin to fall, his pickers gather 60 tons of wild fungi to satisfy European consumers, he said. This fall, they found only 16 tons. "I lost so much this year, I may have to close," he said bleakly. Agnes Dherbeys for The New York Times Carine Bar, who sells wild mushrooms at a farmers" market in Paris, says she avoids buying from unknown purveyors, even though they offer their mushrooms at a fraction of the regular price. Mr. Sant, who runs Cevennes-Truffes, a mushroom company based in St. Anastasie in southern France, says he knows who to blame: outsiders, mostly from Eastern Europe, who at the behest of sellers in Spain have come across the border and hauled away wild mushrooms by the truckload. Even the way the outsiders picked the mushrooms made it unlikely they would grow again next season, he said. While experts dispute that last claim, it is revealing both of one of the more idiosyncratic corners of the French psyche, in which wild mushrooms are viewed as a national patrimony, and also of the frustrations of some French as a borderless Europe opens once exclusively French domains to new economic competitors. That competition has brought with it darker undercurrents of discrimination and hostility toward the European Union's newest - and poorest - citizens from Bulgaria and Romania, and especially the Roma, who are a minority of 20,000 in France. In recent months, France's interior minister called for the Roma to be expelled and a 15-year-old Roma girl was taken off a school bus in front of classmates and deported with her family. The Roma are easily blamed for a range of ills, but while a number of the mushroom pickers are Roma, not all of them are, according to Roma advocates. And while some of the mushrooms are being picked illegally, many are not. How the mushroom is picked matters little, experts say. The real distinction is who gets the money and the volumes involved. While frustrated, Mr. Sant is also sympathetic. Newly arrived Eastern European migrants, including Roma, work under poor conditions for a pittance, he said, but in the process, they are depriving French like him who have made gathering wild mushrooms a thriving business. The quantity of mushrooms being trucked to Spain has become so large that French mushroom companies are suffering. "From the mushrooms" perspective, I don't think they care if they are picked by a native or by someone who is not French and takes them to another country," said Thomas Kuyper, a professor of fungal ecology and diversity at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. The claim that mushrooms were being picked incorrectly, he said, was more about xenophobia and anger about losing business, noting that there were similar attitudes in the Netherlands toward pickers from Germany and Poland. "Are people worried for the mushrooms or about the foreigners?" he asked. For the French, gathering mushrooms is no joking matter. Like jealous lovers, many keep secret the prize patches of woodland they forage from year to year, and even refuse to tell relatives where they pick. So, when people who are not French take the mushrooms, it seems to upset what some see as the natural order of things. Jean Carle, president of Champi-Fruits des Bois, an association of landowners whose properties produce wild mushrooms, says "invaders" are stealing the precious cepes (porcini mushrooms) and "organized gangs" are ravaging the locally beloved lactaria deliciosa, known as milk caps. The extent to which the outsiders are breaking the law is unclear. Picking mushrooms on private land constitutes trespassing; on public land, there are varying rules. In some areas, local government entities charge a fee if a person picks more than four pounds a day, but in other areas, there are no charges. Romanian and Bulgarian citizens, who are allowed to come to France as members of the European Union, are required to have residency permits to work. Those doing the clandestine picking come into France from Spain, though they are Bulgarian or Romanian citizens, French officials said. "Everyone is allowed to take a walk in the woods, but they are gathering astronomical quantities," Mr. Carle said. Jean Louis Traversier of the French forest service estimates that more than 80 percent of this year's harvest of 50 tons of mushrooms in just the southeastern Drôme and Ardèche regions were taken by Romanian and Bulgarian citizens to Spain. Locals tend to describe them all as Roma, but officials, including Mr. Traversier, say it is not possible to conclude that from their passports.