I think what your being bitten by is not a perl thing nor even a DBI thing, but a MySQL limitation.

From the MySQL manual section 6.4.8

The LOAD DATA INFILE statement reads rows from a text file into a table at a very high speed. If the LOCAL keyword is specified, it is interpreted with respect to the client end of the connection. When LOCAL is specified, the file is read by the client program on the client host and sent to the server. If LOCAL is not specified, the file must be located on the server host and is read directly by the server. (LOCAL is available in MySQL Version 3.22.6 or later.)

Try it without the LOCAL keyword.