HI,
You do need to use ODBC in order to use VFP data with perl. Also, if you check in the documentation, you can also use ADO to get some recordsets. I used Perl to retreive VFP data a couple of times. You need to create a DSN that points to your VFP database.

For more informations, search for DBI on the Perl (references) site. If you use the Activestate Perl, it is easier because PPM will install the ODBC libraries for you.

Hope this will help,
Christian Cote