Your description is too vague to do more than guess at the problem, but one possible source of confusion might be that import doesn't export the functions you're expecting it to because the initialization code for @EXPORT et al has not yet run.

Try surrounding the code with BEGIN { } to make sure any necessary initialization happens at compile time. This is done implicitly when you use a module — if you include code directly in your script, you have to provide for this yourself.

I am not sure I understand which variables you need to declare. Are they in package main, but referenced from other packages?