PerlSetEnv vars not available in PerlRequire script

Greetings mod_perl list!

I'm upgrading old debian servers to Ubuntu 10.04 and we have to upgrade
from apache 1.x and mod_perl to apache2 and mod_perl2.x This requires
rewriting configfiles and I'm running into the following problem:

I've got (sort of) the following apache configuration:

<VirtualHost x.x.x.x:40080>

PerlSetEnv      BASE   /home/steven/foo/base

PerlPostConfigRequire   /home/steven/foo/handler.pl

<LocationMatch "(\.mhtml)$">
        SetHandler  perl-script
        PerlHandler Ech::Mason
</LocationMatch>

</virtualHost>

In the handler I've got this:

use Data::Dumper;
print Dumper(\%ENV);

With a apache2ctl start the output is:

$VAR1 = {
          'PATH' =>
'/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games',
          'MOD_PERL_API_VERSION' => '2',
          'MOD_PERL' => 'mod_perl/2.0.4'
        };

As you can see, my BASE variable is not set in the %ENV. Does anybody
knows why?