Since there haven't been any replies yet, I'll post some thoughts:

Adding use vars to make the error go away sounds like the opposite direction from figuring out what the problem is.

The first thing to ask, is what has changed since it last worked. Diffs are great if you have them. Tracing the exports and uses and Dumpering to see what point you start to lose the variable could help too.

You might want to consider having a function that returns a copy of or reference to your %mycode_pegs hash, rather than having it be exported. Just to keep things simple and narrowly scoped, and to make it easy to see when you are declaring it vs defining it vs using it.