You probably didn't try hard enough. If you declare (in your main program):
our %CONFIG = ( ... );
Then anything else can access it via %main::CONFIG (or %::CONFIG). If it's declared in a different package you'd of course use that package name rather than main. See also Exporter.
Update: Oooh, good catch; I didn't notice the relative ordering of the require and the declaration. You'd need to either swap it or wrap the declaration in a BEGIN block to ensure it happened as soon as possible as well.
