**1. Introduction**

Soybean is world's leading agricultural crop with multiple uses including human food, animal feed, edible oil, biofuel, industrial products, cosmetics, etc. In soybean production, United States (US) is the leading producer with 33% of the world's total production of 251.5 million MT, amounting to \$38.5 billion in production value [1,2]. In North-America, there has been an exponential increase of soybean acreage during the second half of last century, but there is a continuous threat of pests attacking this crop. Soybean yield is impacted by various kinds of pests such as fungi, bacteria, and insects [3]. Indeed, the strategies and input costs for pest management in soybean have changed dramatically with time [3-5]. For example, there has been a 130-fold increase in insecticide use across the North-Central US states since 2001 [4].

In regards to insects, soybean has been traditionally attacked by foliage-feeding Lepidopteran and Coleopteran pests such as soybean looper, velvet bean caterpillar, beet armyworm, bean leaf beetle, stem borer, Mexican bean beetle, and soybean leaf miner [6]. However, during the last decade, the invasion of soybean aphid [*Aphis glycines* Matsumura], brown-marmorated stink bug (BMSB) [*Halyomorpha halys* (Stål)], and (although technically not a stink bug) kudzu bug [*Megacopta cribraria* (F.)] in north-central, eastern, and southeastern US, respectively, and the emergence of red-banded stink bug [*Piezodorus guildinii* (Westwood)] as major pest in southern US have drastically changed the pest complex in soybean [4,7,8]. The threat posed by soybean aphid and stink bugs has the potential to rapidly increase as these insects continue to expand their geographical range. For example, in less than 10 years since its initial detection in Wisconsin, soybean aphid had spread across 30 US states and 3 Canadian provinces by 2009

© 2013 Bansal et al.; licensee InTech. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. © 2013 Bansal et al.; licensee InTech. This is a paper distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

[4], and the BMSB has already been detected in 38 US states since first being seen in Pennsyl‐ vania in 1996 [7].

Both soybean aphid and stink bug belong to order Hemiptera which also includes other economic pests such as whiteflies and leafhoppers. To minimize the damage by Hemipteran pests, host-plant resistance in soybean cultivars should constitute an integral part of an integrated pest management (IPM) program. In the current chapter, we attempt to review the recent research advances made on soybean resistance to Hemipteran pests. In the light of various challenges to manage Hemipteran pests, we have proposed strategies for successful and sustainable use of host plant resistance (HPR) in soybean against these pests.
