Hungary: two kilograms in the forest, an inspector at the market

The figure lives in a decree, not in the Act

Hungary’s Forest Act — Act XXXVII of 2009, cited everywhere as the Evt. — contains no number at all. Section 68(f) classes the gathering of mushrooms, wild fruit, flowers and medicinal plants as a forest usufruct, and section 69(7) obliges the manager of a forest in 100 per cent state ownership to tolerate gathering that does not exceed “individual need”. The quantity sits one storey down, in the implementing decree 61/2017. (XII. 21.) FM rendelet, whose section 42(2) provides that individual need means, per person per day, at most “2 kg of mushrooms, 2 kg of wild fruit or 2 kg of medicinal plants”. Quoting the two kilograms as a provision of the Act confuses two levels of law, and it obscures the more interesting point: a figure held in a decree can be changed without going near Parliament.

Both provisions open with the same reservation — unless a legal rule provides otherwise — so neither the duty to tolerate nor the two kilograms is unconditional.

The wording repays a literal reading. The three categories are joined by vagy, or. That is enough to establish that each carries its own two-kilogram ceiling rather than all three sharing one basket. It is not enough to establish that a person may take two kilograms of each on the same day. The text does not settle it, and neither will this article.

The allowance is narrower than it sounds, too. The duty to tolerate applies in wholly state-owned forest. Above individual need, section 42(1)(a) requires the forest manager’s prior written consent; in forest that is not wholly state-owned, section 42(1)(b) requires the prior written consent of the holder of the usufruct right, with no quantity threshold attached at all — that is, from the first cap. Section 69(4) of the Act adds that the forest manager is entitled to set the conditions on which forest usufructs are exercised, unless a legal rule provides otherwise. Two kilograms is therefore the ceiling of a tolerance rather than an entry ticket. Restrictions in protected areas and Natura 2000 sites are a separate question: we did not read the nature conservation act or any site-level rules, so nothing here should be taken as saying that gathering is permitted there.

Then comes section 42(3), the hinge of the whole arrangement. Mushrooms gathered for individual need may not be placed on commercial sale.

A certificate valid for one place and one day

The second storey is decree 107/2011. (XI. 10.) VM, on the collection, processing and marketing of wild mushrooms intended for human consumption. Section 4(1) allows a lot to be marketed or processed only if it carries a certificate of inspection, the gombaminősítési igazolás, contains at most 5 per cent broken and at most 10 per cent damaged mushrooms, and belongs by species to the list in Annex 2. That annex is a table of 75 numbered rows, but row 1 is the column header, so the list holds 74 species — running from cseh kucsmagomba (Verpa bohemica, admitted with a note requiring twenty minutes of heat treatment) to homoki szarvasgomba (Mattirolomyces terfezioides). It is an admission list for trade, not a safety list: it says what may be sold, not what may be eaten.

The decree descends as far as the size of the goods. A cap must measure at least 3 cm across as a rule, 7 cm in the case of őzlábgomba — the parasols, since Annex 2 gives Macrolepiota mastoidea and Macrolepiota procera under that Hungarian name — 5 cm for vargánya, the boletes, and 1 cm for mezei szegfűgomba, the fairy-ring champignon; a summer truffle needs a fruit body heavier than 5 g. The seven underground fungi at the end of the list may be sold only during the collecting period fixed by a separate decree, and for the week that follows it.

The inspector is the gomba-szakellenőr. Section 3(1) requires a qualification from a closed list, a fitness-for-work and health certificate no more than five years old covering mental competence and the normal functioning of the senses, attendance every five years at a ministry-run online refresher, and notification of the intention to practise to the Pest county government office. Not to Nébih: the national food chain safety office, on its own page about the notification, states that since 1 January 2017 these matters have belonged to the county office and no longer to Nébih.

The certificate has a very short life. At a market it must be displayed visibly beside the lot, may be used only at that selling place and only on the day it was issued, and must be handed back after trading to the inspector who wrote it (section 6(3)). The original stays with the person who asked for the inspection and the copy with the inspector; the two-year retention duty falls on the inspector where certification took place away from a market, and on the market operator where it took place at one (section 6(2)). For truffles a certificate may be issued only once a collection log has also been produced (section 6(4)).

What the regime does not do is check what anyone carries home. For members of the public the decree provides a separate inspection-with-advice, the lakossági gombaminősítés, carried out by the same inspector. The definition in section 2(h) says only “mushroom certification and information for the public”; whether a fee may be charged is not addressed anywhere in the text, so this article does not settle it either. Mushrooms certified that way may not afterwards be sold (section 7(2)), and on that occasion a species outside the market list may be declared fit for human consumption (section 11(3)). The basket rule, by contrast, is severe: where a poisonous mushroom cannot be clearly separated out from a single collecting vessel, or where the vessel holds death caps (gyilkos galóca), the whole lot is condemned as unfit (section 5(2)).

A licence, a numbered logbook and a dog that has passed an exam

The third storey is decree 24/2012. (III. 19.) VM, on collecting underground fungi, whose substantive sections took effect on 1 January 2013. Section 1(1) admits to the collection of trifla only a person who has successfully completed official training organised by the forestry ministry, or who holds an equivalent qualification obtained in a contracting state of the European Economic Area. To that is added the forest manager’s written consent, which may be given only to someone holding a collection log (section 2(5)); the log must be submitted to the forestry authority for validation by 30 April of the year following its issue or its previous validation (section 7(6)). The ministry publishes the serial numbers of valid logs on its website each month (section 8(7)), and the forestry authority keeps an official register of qualified persons, certificates and logs (section 76/B of the Forest Act). The dog must pass an aptitude examination after training run by an organisation whose statutes cover truffle collecting (section 4(1)); the duty to have it identified by transponder falls on its owner (section 5(1)); and a collector may work with at most two dogs at once, each carrying a clearly visible mark that does not endanger the animal’s health or safety (section 5(2)). Section 6 forbids digging, hoeing and raking, unnecessary damage to plant roots, taking unripe fruit bodies, leaving the truffle nest unfilled or filling it with soil brought from elsewhere, searching or collecting between sunset and sunrise, and lifting a truffle with a tool whose blade is wider than 5 cm. Several of those rules have counterparts in Croatia and are not a Hungarian peculiarity; the licence is.

The Annex sets seasons for seven species: Tuber aestivum (including Tuber uncinatum) from 15 May to 31 December, Tuber mesentericum from 1 August to 31 December, Tuber macrosporum from 1 September to 31 December, Tuber magnatum from 1 October to 31 December, Tuber brumale from 1 November to 15 March, Choiromyces meandriformis from 10 June to 15 October and Mattirolomyces terfezioides from 20 August to 15 November. These are defaults rather than fixtures. Section 76/A(2) of the Forest Act lets the forestry authority, having regard to the views of organisations that collect underground fungi, set a different period for a given calendar year — for the whole country, for part of it, or for a particular species — where unusual fruiting caused by the weather warrants it, and restrict or prohibit collection where a species has declined or on other species-protection grounds. The decision is published on the authority’s website (section 76/A(3)). Anyone planning a season from the Annex should first check whether such a decision is in force that year.

The exemption from the course, the dog’s examination and the logbook is narrow. Section 2(6) covers the owner of a private forest in his own forest, and the manager registered by the forestry authority for that same forest, up to 200 g or three truffles a day, and only where they are not placed on the market. It does nothing for an ordinary collector.

Questions the rules keep apart

Species protection is a fourth and independent storey. Decree 13/2001. (V. 9.) KöM, in Annex 9, headed “Protected fungi and lichens (lichenised fungi)”, numbers items 1 to 58 as fungi and 59 to 75 as lichens, giving each a conservation value of 5 000 or 10 000 forints; for fungi that value attaches to the fruit body, for lichens to the thallus. That is 58 protected fungal species and 17 lichens — and the 75 there must not be confused with the 75 rows of the market table, since the two figures coincide by accident and describe entirely different things. Decree 107/2011 closes the loop: section 8(3) forbids collecting the protected fungal species, and section 5(1a) requires the inspector to pick any such specimen out of a lot and set it aside as unfit for human consumption. In practice this means that not everything prized in a kitchen may lawfully be gathered: császárgalóca, Amanita caesarea, is on the protected list and does not appear on the market list at all.

There is also the question of where these texts come from. They were read in the Hatályos Jogszabályok Gyűjteménye at net.jogtar.hu, a collection of consolidated texts rather than an official gazette, which is why the instruments are cited by their formal designations rather than by the website. The date 21 December 2017 is not printed on the page: it is the Magyar Közlöny promulgation date carried inside the designation of decree 61/2017. Each version read here carries its own validity banner — decree 107/2011 from 15 May 2023, 61/2017 from 1 July 2024, 24/2012 from 11 June 2024, 13/2001 from 1 August 2025, and the Forest Act from 1 January 2026, that last one marked as running only to 30 September 2026, after which the same address will serve a different text.

And the point that matters most to a reader with a basket: none of these provisions says what is safe to eat. An inspector’s certificate is a precondition of sale, not a guarantee to a consumer, and the list of 74 species is a schedule of trading permissions. How old the habit is can be seen in a street photograph: in 1968 a sheet-metal kiosk of the capital’s public health and epidemiology station stood on a Budapest square, its board promising free mushroom inspection on weekend afternoons and directing gatherers on other days to the mushroom experts — gombaismerő — at the markets. The office on that board is gone and the hours can no longer be read, but the word survives in the statute: the closed list of qualifications in section 3(1a) of decree 107/2011 still recognises an exam passed on a gombaismerő course held between 1955 and 1984.