Environment Proxy Support for the load_ncbi_taxonomy.pl script

My institute network is behind a proxy. I have an environment proxy defined in the 
~/.bashrc file

http_proxy=http://username:password@proxy.network.com:port/
https_proxy=http://username:password@proxy.network.com:port/ 
ftp_proxy=http://username:password@proxy.network.com:port/

I removed the Perl's Net:FTP module dependency and am using LWP:UserAgent for proxy support.