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It was 1999, Ambassador Ken Quinn was leaving the U.S. State Department, and he didn’t know what to do next. An Iowa native, he ended up coming home for a job as the director of the World Food Prize Foundation here in Des Moines. Sounded interesting.

But there wasn’t all that much to direct. He arrived to find a two-room, one-employee operation with four corporate donors and one daunting responsibility: Businessman John Ruan wanted his idea to become “the Nobel Prize of food and agriculture.”

“It seemed like an impossible task,” Quinn recalled.

But progress has been made. Earlier this month, 800 people from 65 nations, representing governments, international organizations, corporations and universities, gathered at the state Capitol for the award ceremony.

Then there are the other events. “When I came, the symposium was half a day and had about 80 people in attendance,” Quinn said. “This year, it was 2 1/2 days, and we had more than 700 people.”

It takes connections to make an event more important, and it takes an important event to make the right connections. But gradually that impossible equation gets solved, and Quinn has now linked up with some folks who could play a very big role in the future of the World Food Prize.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation – you know, the group with a large share of the planet’s money at its disposal – paid the World Food Prize event a visit in 2006 and last year invited Quinn and planning director Frank Swoboda to Seattle to talk things over.

“They said they meet a more diverse group of people at our event than at any of the other things they do around the world,” Quinn said. “They said they would like to help us put on the 2008 symposium and shape it so it would be useful to an agenda of ending hunger, and they gave us a grant of $285,000.”

Everyone should have such friends.

So the people visiting Des Moines this year during perfect October weather included top members of the Gates Foundation, along with Robert Zoellick, president of The World Bank; Judith Rodin, president of The Rockefeller Foundation; Pedro Sanchez, co-chair of the U.N. Millennium Project Task Force on Hunger; and many other big players in the food game.

Part of Quinn’s master plan has been to contact businesses and groups with an interest in food and agriculture and say: “You’re going to have a meeting, so why not have it in Des Moines at the same time as the World Food Prize?”

Now the Board for International Food and Agricultural Development holds its national conference here instead of in Washington, D.C. The D.C.-based Partnership to Cut Hunger and Poverty in Africa meets here. So does the U.S. Grains Council.

The plan also calls for building a stable of big names, and the World Food Prize Council of Advisors features former presidents George H.W. Bush and Jimmy Carter. Unfortunately, Dad’s participation wasn’t enough to get President George W. Bush to accept any of Quinn’s annual invitations. The next president can expect a letter, too.

A prestigious event should look prestigious, and the Capitol provides a majestic setting for the Laureate Award Ceremony.

And you need to get attention. This year’s event was covered by The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. The famous names being honored – former senators Bob Dole and George McGovern – no doubt helped.

Dole, by the way, paid a quick visit to the man who started it all, John Ruan, who was physically unable to attend the festivities.

Ruan once dreamed of a skyscraper that would serve as an international food and agriculture center, and that never happened. But his World Food Prize dream is coming along just fine.