Removing stopwords is an important step in natural language processing (NLP) because it helps to improve the performance and accuracy of NLP models and makes the text data more consistent and easier to work with.

Stopwords are words that are commonly used in a language but do not carry much meaning on their own, such as 'the', 'and', 'a', 'is', 'of', etc. They are usually removed from text data because they do not contribute much to the text's overall meaning.